[2019] Mutated colours all vanished after update

After some investigation, I understand the cause of this...

Unfortunately, any colors lost from this update can't be automatically recovered ? .Dino colors, after their randomized selection, are saved to the creature and referenced by an index number only that is associated with a master array of colors. (No we can't change this unless you want your servers to slow to a crawl, string comparisons are resource expensive)

Unofficial servers (and singleplayer) that run mods are vulnerable to this issue and have always been, any change to the order of mods or anything that alt

Yes, though you should be aware that making any changes to your active mods can still potentially cause this kind of issue for the time being.

Don't worry it doesn't break the feature of breeding color mutations itself, the problem is just that the array of colors went through a change that got things a little messed up.
We didn't remove any of the available colors, we just removed a ton of duplication that was occurring and making all these color reference inconsistent.

It's any mods. what was happening was that every single mod added was duplicating the color definitions in the array. so there were multiple instances of every color.
When breeding and the game chooses random color mutation it randomly pick

Here is an option that should work pretty well for anyone that knows that none of the mods they had installed added any custom colors. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1940481639
This mod will try to correct all of your dino colors. It works by making assumptions about what the color definitions array looked like for you before the update that caused this, so It's not suitable for us to do in the core game... but as an option, this should actually work pretty well for many.

Just to double check before I opened my mouth, I downloaded that source, and while I haven't spent a ton of time looking through it I would say it's doing things in a similar manner to the mod I just linked. Except that in this tool, color indices and matching color definitions have been manually entered into dictionaries (and by the looks of it there are collections of value data for at least some mods that it can download from somewhere? I have never used this tool before, but I am assuming that is how it could be determining any offsets that would otherwise mismatch the index numbers).
He

@IanHighlander @CyberAngel67
It is definitely an impressive tool.
But do you see the color indices there on the right?
Notice how they are all at 56 or less?
There are 56 color definitions in the core game currently. (And then the dye indices which are all 200+)
Inside of the tool itself they are all predefined to what color they represent. The amount of data that had to be sorted out and manually entered for this tool is insane.
The only thing the tool is loading from the creature data is that byte value itself:
This is the data I just copied from the tool itself (Dictionaries i

I do understand that this inconvenienced a lot of people. I really do. That's why I have been spending my own free time trying to help people understand what happened (even at risk of getting in trouble for oversharing information) and to work on something to prevent it in the future and to try and possibly help find ways to make this less awful for those that were affected by it... all when I would normally be resting.
The change went through testing, but the test conditions that were necessary to have exposed this are not normal for any studio that I have ever interacted with.
Trying to

I think I understand where your confusion is coming from.
The change we made was fixing a bug in how mod data is merged in when you launch a game. it was resulting in that, for every single mod installed, the core color definitions were being duplicated. That duplication now no longer happens. ASB is doing assumed correction, and since you weren't using any mods that added new colors it's actually easy to figure out what the right color is in your case. It is mathematically consistent.
This bug was actually how people could breed for mutations of the dye colors (That's a whole other topic

To that point Cedric would love to be able to do what I did here, but often when something goes wrong on that scale, the engineers are being scrambled to figure out the problem and then immediately hop on fixing it. There isn't always someone to give the information in full to Cedric so that he can give a more detailed update. The chain of communication just isn't always established that fast. In some cases, we just flat out can't talk about a particular issue until after it's fixed because people will take advantage of and abuse it (If that is already happening in a particular situation, we w

Not yet, people are off for the holiday so it hasn't been tested and validated yet. Gotta try to make sure I didn't create more problems with with the change.
I'll make sure to update this thread again when it goes out.

It took longer than I would have liked, BUT