Repair every bundle that renders pink on macOS: overlays, deployment zones, silhouettes, ID tokens and the miniatures

[ironsquadronfr-hub]

This is the pink your Mac tester is seeing. It is not a link issue and it is not his cache.

What it is

Range, Cohesion and Movement all spawn Custom AssetBundles built around the BucketheadBits/Projector shaders, and those were compiled without a Metal variant. I pulled the published bundles down from the mod's own URLs just now and read the platform list out of each shader:

bundle, downloaded live from the mod's URL	platforms in the shader	Metal?
halfcohesion_27mm	[4, 15]	no
projector_bomb_cart	[4, 15]	no
projector_tokenrangetwo	[4, 15]	no
movement_27mm_speed1	[4, 15]	no
projector_27mm	[4, 15]	no
projector_27mm_isq_v6 (ours, as a control)	[4, 14]	yes

4 is Direct3D 9, 15 is Direct3D 11, 14 is Metal. The file downloads fine — it is 8 to 13 KB, it opens, the shader is in there. It was simply never compiled for macOS. Your Windows box reads variant 15, which exists; a Mac has nothing to read, so Unity falls back to its error material and paints the projector pink. A Windows player with a completely cold cache would see exactly what you see.

What confirms it

His own report is the proof, once you look at what works. Range renders for him, cohesion does not. Our overlay module covers all eight base sizes for range, but only 100/120/150mm and the oblongs for cohesion — 27, 50 and 70mm fall back to the mod's bundles. Everything pink is a mod bundle, everything that renders is one of ours. No exceptions, including the max movement templates and the bomb cart and graffiti buttons he named.

What this does

One defect, three routes to it. 145 bundles now load a repaired, bi-platform rebuild, built from the mod's own prefabs and shader source and recompiled for both graphics APIs. Every replacement is byte for byte what has been validated in game. Windows reads the same variant it always did — that is the half of the test I cannot run, so it is the half worth your attention, and the section on what else changed is where to start.

40 in your own data files — Movement, Range and Cohesion, swapped where they live: MovementLinks, RangeRulerLinks, CohesionLinks. (An earlier version of this PR routed these through a lookup table in our module; plain URL swaps in your files are easier to read, revertible entry by entry, and behave identically for every player.)

23 more written straight into your files — never resolved through the link tables. Swapped in place, 31 occurrences across 16 files:

what	shader	where
8 deployment zones + the 3x3 masking projector	Projector/Deployment	SETUP_CONTROLLER, GAME_CONTROLLER
3 silhouettes (the SIL button)	Silhouette	Unit_Leader, POI_Token, BombCarts
10 unit ID tokens	Tokens/Lambert Channel Mask	11 object JSON
the shelf hologram	Logo/Fast Hologram	Shelf

The deployment zones matter most here: they paint at the start of every single game, so on a Mac that is pink before anyone has touched anything.

82 miniatures — the unit models, from contrib/cards/**/minis[].bundle and official.json. 265 URL occurrences across 11 files. 66 carry BucketheadBits/Units/Color Replacer, the rest add Glow Geometry and Rim Glow Geometry Shield, and three carry Particles/Standard Unlit — a stock Unity name, but baked into the bundle without a Metal variant like the others, so it breaks identically. None of them is a Custom Model with a stock TTS material; those carry no shader at all and are untouched.

Nothing was assumed. Every bundle here was downloaded from its published URL and had its shaders read out of the typetree. The 82 miniatures came back 82 out of 82 on platforms [4, 15] — Direct3D 9 and 11, no Metal. Same for the other 63. As a control, one of ours came back [4, 14].

After this, no bundle without a Metal variant is referenced anywhere in the repository.

Where the files live, and the one thing to weigh

No binary lands in your repo — the whole PR is a text diff. The 63 small bundles sit under mod/data/isq-overlay-assets and the 82 miniatures (61 MB) under mod/data/isq-metal-rebuilds, both on the fork's isq-qol branch, same place ISQ_ASSETS already resolves to.

That is the honest cost of this PR: the mod pulls these bundles from a personal fork. I think it beats every Mac player seeing pink figures, but it is your call and I will not pretend it is free. Which is what the next section is about.

What else changed, besides the platform

I diffed every one of the 145 against the copy currently published — material properties and projector geometry, not just the shader — so this is measured rather than asserted.

116 of 145 are identical apart from the Metal variant. The other 29 fall into three groups, and only the first is a deliberate change:

18 movement bundles carry a fix for two upstream bugs in the Maximum Move footprint. Both are visible on Windows too, and they are the reason these came from a later build than the rest:

• _BaseSize was left at 70 on every base above large — the ring radius _ProjectorRadius had been tuned per size, the base footprint had not, so they were all derived from the 70mm. Now set per base: 100, 120, 150 as appropriate. 15 bundles.
• BB_MovementProjector places the footprint at halfBase / (_ProjectorRadius + halfBase) of the projector's extent, while that extent is _ProjectorRadius (checked: m_OrthographicSize == _ProjectorRadius on all 24). The drawn radius was therefore always smaller than the base and changed with speed, since R changes. A base footprint that grows when you move faster — reproduced in game. The three 27mm bundles compensate with _ProjectorRadius nudged by 0.087, which is the deployment offset the mod already applies in templateInfo.deployMod.small.

Happy to pull these out into their own PR if you would rather judge them separately — say the word.

One miniature drifted, unintentionally. ig-100_magnagaurd_mat has _SwapOutline at 0.217 where the published copy has 0.348. That is a rebuild artefact, not a decision. Flagging it rather than quietly patching a bundle I cannot test; if you want the published value back it is a one-property edit.

The remaining differences are properties the published materials never stored at all — _BaseGap, _ArcCompress / _ArcSpacing, and the eighteen Color Replacer knobs on the three arc_* bundles. In every case the published material has no entry and the rebuilt one declares the shader's value. Rebuilding against the current shader writes out the full property set; nothing was retuned.

How thoroughly this was checked

Our own inventory of the broken bundles dates from May, and the mod has moved since — several assets have been re-uploaded under new UGC entries that the inventory never knew about. So the final sweep ignored the inventory entirely and worked from the repository itself: every URL used in a bundle role, found by its field — AssetbundleURL, minis[].bundle, sharedBundle. 190 unique bundle URLs.

• 75 now point at a repaired copy.
• 115 are still on Steam, and every single one of them contains no shader at all. They render through stock TTS materials, so there is nothing for a missing Metal variant to break. This includes the three sharedBundle entries in StarWarsLegion.lua, the table bundle in TABLE.3a3ed9.json and the Infantry Support Platform — all re-uploads that replaced assets our old inventory had flagged.

So the claim is not "we fixed the ones we knew about". It is: every bundle this repository loads has been downloaded and had its shaders read, and none of them is missing Metal any more.

No blind spots left, and one more thing found

I had listed Sabine Wren and Black Sun Enforcers as unreachable, because our old inventory has bundles for them that appear nowhere in the sources. Looking properly: they no longer use a bundle at all. Both now spawn from mesh + diffuse — plain Custom Models on stock TTS materials, which carry no shader and cannot be hit by this. Their URLs answer. Same story for the Infantry Support Platform. So there is nothing left unaccounted for.

While sweeping every mesh and diffuse in the card data — 911 URLs — one dead link turned up in the official set, and it is worth your attention because it is not a shader problem:

The operative token has a dead texture. Fourteen tokens share one disc mesh in official.json — Bane, Complete the Mission, Condition, Graffiti, Incognito, Objective, Operative, Proton Charge, Shield, Smoke, Victory, Wheel Mode — and one of the fourteen, the operative marker, points at a diffuse no Steam CDN serves any more. A Custom Model whose texture fails to load renders pink, and unlike everything else in this PR this one would show on Windows too, on any cold cache.

The right texture was already in the mod: Operative_Marker_Tokens.125746.json carries the same mesh with a diffuse that answers, 162 KB of JPEG. Both copies of official.json now use it.

Two other dead-link problems I did not touch, so you know they exist:

• templateInfo.templateMesh and templateInfo.templateCollider in StarWarsLegion.lua — the three physical movement template models and their colliders — are 404 everywhere, as is the Mud map's diffuse. Cold cache means pink movement templates, Windows included. These need re-uploading; I have nothing to point them at.
• contrib/cards/homebrew.json is largely gone: 368 of its 482 model and texture URLs are 404. That is community content whose uploads have expired, not mod assets, so I left it alone entirely — but if the homebrew spawner is meant to work, most of it currently cannot.

What we would like to happen next

This is a workaround, not where it should end up. It serves the repaired bundles from our fork, which is fine for now and not fine forever. The sequence we are hoping for:

1. You confirm it works on your side — his Mac fixed, and your Windows unchanged. That second half matters: the rebuilds are bi-platform and Windows should read exactly the variant it read before, but it deserves a look rather than our word for it.
2. You upload the repaired bundles to Steam UGC under your publishing account. UGC entries are immutable, so this means new entries and new URLs, and it is the one step nobody outside the mod can do. The whole repaired set — 152 bundles, covering far more than the 40 here — is already public in the Metal fix release, ready to upload as-is.
3. You repoint MovementLinks, RangeRulerLinks and CohesionLinks at the new URLs.
4. Then the swapped URLs get pointed back at Steam. Every swap is a one-line edit in the file where the URL lives, so retiring the workaround is a mechanical find-and-replace.

No rush on our side, and no hard feelings if you would rather ship the workaround for a while — the Mac players stop seeing pink either way. But step 2 is the only thing that actually retires the bug for everyone, including anyone who never installs anything.

Separate bug, worth knowing about

While checking every URL in mod/src I found seven that are 404 on every Steam CDN, not just the dead cloud-3 host:

• StarWarsLegion.lua:113 — templateInfo.templateMesh, the three physical movement template models
• StarWarsLegion.lua:71-73 — templateInfo.templateCollider, their three colliders
• Custom_Maps/Mud/BATTLEFIELD.526772.json:39 — the Mud map's DiffuseURL

Those really are gone, and that one is a cache story: anyone with a cold cache gets pink movement templates, Windows included. You only don't see it because yours have been cached for years. Not fixed here — those assets need re-uploading.

Update, 18 Aug — the follow-up commits

The same branch now also carries, each in its own commit:

• Movement templates that survive a load. The two spawned templates are wired to each other through volatile script state; after any save, load or undo they still stand on the table but every touch throws attempt to index a nil value (turnToCursor, positionTemplate, onCollisionStay spam). They now remove themselves when the wiring is gone. Upstream bug, every platform — to reproduce: start a move, save, reload, touch the template.
• Maximum-move rings that a load orphaned get swept. Same volatility, other family: the only reference to the ring is script state no save carries, so one that made it into a save could never be cleared again. Your own load sweep — standbyTokens, last call of onload — already destroys Cohesion Ruler and Range Ruler by name; Maximum Move was missing from its list and now joins it.
• The overlay switch survives saves and undos. Same treatment as the chess clocks and the welcome dialog: the mode rides in the save blob and load imposes it instead of toggling.
• The overlay toggle no longer errors on tokens with a ruler out, and it resets every family's button flag so no button is left reading the wrong state.
• The hover hotkeys no longer draw on order tokens. An assigned order token carries the selected unit's unitData in its script globals, so it passed for a unit and range bands or a cohesion ruler got drawn around the token itself. Range hover now draws for unit figures, range-bearing tokens (everything that declares a rangeKey) and bomb carts; cohesion hover for unit figures only — which is what the vanilla path already enforces through its unitData check.
• The three movement template speeds get clearly distinct colors, and the speed-1 template's collider is pulled back so it stops pushing notched bases — four retuned template bundles, hosted with the rest on isq-qol.
• Two small cleanups: an unused trigger and the two aliases only it called.

The serving strategy also changed since the first push, as described above: the lookup table inside our module is gone, every repaired URL is swapped in place in the file where it lives, and no binary is committed in the PR.

[ironsquadronfr-hub]

Heads-up: rebased on current Mandos+MacFix and force-pushed. Two things changed since the first push:

1. Serving strategy — the lookup table inside our module is gone and no binary is committed here any more: every repaired URL is a plain in-place swap in the file where it lives, so the whole diff is text.
2. Eight more commits, detailed at the end of the description — notably: movement templates no longer throw attempt to index a nil value after a save/load/undo (upstream bug, every platform), the Iron Squadron overlay switch now survives saves and undos, and the hover hotkeys no longer draw overlays on order tokens.

Nothing changes in what we are asking: your test on Mac + Windows, then the Steam UGC upload when you are happy.