Project color library entries lost (4.6, 5.x, 5.4)

Hello everyone!
Has anyone experienced the same problem?
I ran into this already twice. Once while working with Unity 4.6, and right now while working with Unity 5.
Unfortunately, I cannot get into this more specifically, because I cannot remember any overlapping circumstances of both cases.
All I can say is that I created a color library for a project and at some point, while the .colors file was still located in the Editor folder, the entries were gone when I tried accessing them through the inspector.
Could I have done something wrong for this to happen or does this seem to be a bug?

Greetings,
Shu

 

Just wanted to leave a note here that this is still happening.
I create color palettes, they are located in the Editor folder. I can click on the file and the Inspector shows all the colors.
But after a while, mostly after changing a scene, the colors included in the palette will be gone. This only seems to happen ONCE per palette. If I remember correctly, there has never been a palette that got its colors deleted twice.
Anyway, this is happening quite regularly now, which is not so cool.
If I had to guess, it's about 80% of the libraries getting cleared of their content at some point.

 

This still persists.
Color library entries get deleted by themselves. It's always the whole library, not just singular entries.
What's up with that?

It has been almost 2 years now since I reported this happens in 4.6.
Now, it still happens in 5.4.2f1 and I am pretty sure it's still present in 5.5 and 5.6 beta.

Does nobody use color libraries?
Or why am I seemingly the only person here that has trouble with this?

 

@richardkettlewell
Thank you for your reply!
How should I document this? I don't really know how this could have a reproduction project.
It's very sporadic and project independent. Before the issue shows up, everything seems normal.
And after the entries are gone.. well, they are gone then.
Maybe I should send you one of the color libraries that this happened with?
I highly doubt you can use that to reproduce the issue, but you may see some errors in the file's code?
Let me know what you're thinking and I will report a bug accordingly.

EDIT:
I just took a look into the .colors code and it doesn't look suspicious.
Maybe I should regularly backup the file's code.

 

@richardkettlewell I've had this happen occasionally too - the colour swatches being lost somewhere (using OSX Unity 4.x and 5.x). I never noticed exactly when it happened so could never reproduce it.

 

@richardkettlewell
I might have found the problem.
I just inspected the .colors file that has had its colors deleted.
Those files usually _do not_ get their colors deleted a second time (at least I cannot remember that that has happened at any point).

The thing is, that file has its "m_Name" specified as the name that I have chosen when creating the .colors.
On the other hand, when I create a new .colors, that file will just have blank space right next to "m_Name:" even though I gave it a name.

I guess Unity rebuilds the .colors at some point because the name hasn't been saved (it is being displayed in the Editor's inspector, however, but that might just be cached?).
Sounds like the rebuild process deletes the entries?

This is the top part from a .colors that I just created (I named it "test"):

__________

%YAML 1.1
%TAG !u! tag:unity3d.com,2011:
--- !u!114 &1
MonoBehaviour:
m_ObjectHideFlags: 52
m_PrefabParentObject: {fileID: 0}
m_PrefabInternal: {fileID: 0}
m_GameObject: {fileID: 0}
m_Enabled: 1
m_EditorHideFlags: 1
m_Script: {fileID: 12323, guid: 0000000000000000e000000000000000, type: 0}
m_Name:
m_EditorClassIdentifier:
m_Presets:

__________

This top part looks exactly the same in the file that has had its colors deleted with the exception that its name is shown there.

In both cases, all the color entries are shown below "m_Presets".
But, of course, I had to enter all the colors again in the first .color that has had its entries deleted.

Also, I am running OSX 11.6 if that is useful information.

EDIT:
Some more information:
I am creating the .colors inside the project.
It is located in the "Editor" folder then.

 

@superpig
@richardkettlewell

Interesting. I didn't know one could even save a project. I always just closed the Editor.
However, after creating a new .colors and clicking "Save Project", the following error gets spammed in the Console (always twice, each time I maximize the Console view (using touch gesture) and get back to the normal view; this behaviour stopped after trying to access the file from Visual Studio Code).

This is the error:

__________

MissingReferenceException: The object of type 'ColorPresetLibrary' has been destroyed but you are still trying to access it.
Your script should either check if it is null or you should not destroy the object.
UnityEditor.Editor.IsOpenForEdit (System.String& message) (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/Inspector/Editor.cs:612)
UnityEditor.InspectorWindow.DrawEditor (UnityEditor.Editor editor, Int32 editorIndex, Boolean rebuildOptimizedGUIBlock, System.Boolean& showImportedObjectBarNext, UnityEngine.Rect& importedObjectBarRect) (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/Inspector/InspectorWindow.cs:1101)

UnityEditor.InspectorWindow.DrawEditors (UnityEditor.Editor[] editors) (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/Inspector/InspectorWindow.cs:1030)

UnityEditor.InspectorWindow.OnGUI () (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/Inspector/InspectorWindow.cs:352)

System.Reflection.MonoMethod.Invoke (System.Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, System.Reflection.Binder binder, System.Object[] parameters, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono/build/mcs/class/corlib/System.Reflection/MonoMethod.cs:222)

__________

When trying to access the file after that error shows up, VSC tells me, the file cannot be displayed because it is a binary, very large or uses text encoding that isn't supported.

Saving the project again and relaunching Unity as well as VSC doesn't change the fact that the .colors cannot be accessed with VSC anymore.

 

@richardkettlewell

I was pretty sure I could reproduce this easily, so I made a list for reporting the bug.
Unfortunately, I am not able to reproduce this.

But here are the steps that, as far as I know, _should_ be causing this error (which they are not. Something is still missing to reproduce. I will update the list as soon as I run into a way to reproduce this reliably. Maybe somebody reading this knows what could be missing.):


Using
OSX 11.6
Unity 5.4.2p2

1. Open Unity
2. Create new project
3. Select "Main Camera"
4. Click on "Main Camera"s Camera component's "Background" color
5. Window is opening for color selection
6. Click icon right next to "Presets"
7. Click "Create New Library ..."
8. Type a name: "test"
9. Location: "Project Folder"
10. Click "Create"
11. test.colors should have been created in Assets/Editor/
12. Add a few colors, name them
13. File -> Save Project

 

Hi, I can still reproduce this with Unity 5.6.1f1.