Unity has a 8 digit Hex color, and that’s insane!

hex in unity

I noticed something today. Unity has a hex value for colours, which is great – I hate having to remember RGB values between various graphics programs. But Unity’s hex value has 8 digits (see above), which is INSANE! Hex should be 6, it’s always been 6. It’s literally Greek for 6! 

I assume the last 2 digits are for the alpha value, which is just weird because I’ve never seen it displayed like that. I wonder if that’ll catch on in the world of web development, where to use the alpha channel you have to convert the hex to rgba();

I noticed this while doing new work on Escape Vector, my timing-based game in Unity, which I almost recently abandoned because I got a bit sick of it.

I got dismayed when creating this because I really wanted it to look like the nice soft-shaded videos I created from 3Ds Max (see the video below), but unfortunately to recreate that look in Unity would be:

  • Difficult
  • Probably impossible to get it looking right on mobile
  • More stuff to learn (see “difficult” up above)
  • Time consuming (see all of the above!)

…and this project was supposed to be a nice quick easy one that allows me to learn a few more techniques with the satisfaction of shipping something, without remaining in the depressing state of development limbo for months.

*Edit* – The guys in the Unity Developers Facebook group have schooled me that “hex” actually is short for hexadecimal, so doesn’t have to be 6 characters at all.