[Solved] Some assets always considered as new

Hi,

I'm working on a project with 2 other people. I'm the graphic designer. From about the very beginning of the project (1 year ago), I have 3 .mat files that are constantly tagged as new/changed by Collab, and so systematically re-uploaded each time I synchronize. The thing is, I do not edit these files each time. In fact I didn't touched them for months now, but Unity keeps considering them as new almost each time I'm working on the project.

This problem is not a severe one, as it doesn't prevent me from working, but it's still annoying.
Do you have an idea of what could make these 3 files to be always considered as new ?

PS : I'm working on Unity 2017.1.0 right now but the problem has been occuring from almost a year now, with every version we worked on.

Thank you!

 

Hi @y4m0! From the image you shared, it seems that those materials are being edited, not added. Were these materials made by a shader plugin from the asset store, by any chance?

 

Hello ! Thank you for your reply.

Yes, that's what I was trying to explain : those 3 materials systematically "act" as if they where edited, but they're not !
They're totally standard materials, and are based on the standard shader... Below is an exemple.

I use a lot of standard and non-standard materials in my project, but only those 3 ones have this issue, from the beginning (in fact they're probably the 3 first materials I created for this project).

Maybe to get rid of this problem I should create 3 identical materials from scratch to replace them, but this is a strange bug and I'd like to know what is really happening. Could it be some sort of corrupted meta issue in any way ?

 

Before you try recreating those materials from scratch, would you mind opening your Collab Toolbar, hover over these materials and select See Differences to see what parts of your material are showing as being modified? You'll need to select a diff tool in your Preferences->External Tools menu to use this feature.

 

Hi,

I installed DiffMerge and tried what you told me. Here's what was found for the 3 images.
It seams that the _MainTex : m_Offset value is the one changing everytime.

Do you have an idea of why this happens, and how to prevent it ?

Edit : I forgot to mention earlier those materials are animated ones, as the texture itself is a spritesheet and the developper moves it in a certain way to have the material being animated (sorry for the very bad explanation).
As we use this technique on a lot of other materials, I didn't think this could be part of the problem, but seeing the DiffMerge log I discussed with the developper and the way he manages these particuliar materials is clearly the cause of it.
So... you can consider this subject as solved. Thank you for your time!

 

If you have an animation on this material, like a treadmill, collab will catch the differences created everytime you clic play. That seems to be the case here with the offset value changed.

 

Yes Marc, it definitely seems to be what happens. Thank you!