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PlayerColorAssigner

Tsvrc.Player.PlayerColorAssigner assigns every player a stable, visually distinct color from an 82-entry palette, one slot per player up to VRChat's absolute maximum instance size (80 is the configurable hard cap; the world author and instance creator can each still join on top of that, for 82 in the worst case), keyed off their numeric player ID so every client independently resolves the same color for the same player with no per-lookup network traffic. See Give each player a unique color for a task-oriented walkthrough.

Usage​

Call Initialize() once per instance start, before any GetColor call. Multiple consumers that need matching colors should share one PlayerColorAssigner instance rather than each deriving their own: the whole point of the synced shuffle order is that everyone agrees.

assigner.Initialize();
Color c = assigner.GetColor(TsPlayer.GetPlayerID(somePlayer));

Why the palette is shuffled, and how​

A player's raw color slot is just their numeric player ID modulo the palette size, cheap and deterministic, but it means the nth player to ever join any instance always gets the same slot, so two friends who happen to join in the same relative order across sessions always see the same two colors paired together. Initialize fixes that by generating a random permutation of palette indices (a synced byte[] _order) once per instance, so the same raw slot maps to a different actual color each session. Only the owner actually shuffles and broadcasts it: a non-owner's own Initialize call just ensures a sane identity-order default (_order[i] = i) is in place locally until the owner's real order arrives, so GetColor is never called against an uninitialized array.

Edge cases worth knowing​

  • GetColor never throws: an empty or missing palette returns Color.white, and a numeric ID that doesn't parse (see TsPlayer.GetNumericPlayerId) simply resolves to slot 0.
  • Calling GetColor before Initialize (or before the owner's synced order has arrived) is safe. The palette-index modulo alone still produces a color, just not yet the session-shuffled one.
  • The palette itself is a fixed, hand-tuned hue sweep (two passes around the color wheel at alternating saturation/value) chosen for maximum distinctness between adjacent slots, not a generated gradient. Changing its length changes the modulo divisor for every ID.