How do I get the shader color-property to show up in the Inspector?

Here is the code that I just copied from the Shader tutorial:

   Shader "Tutorial/Basic" {
        Properties {
            _Color ("Main Color", Color) = (1,0.5,0.5,1)
        }
        SubShader {
            Pass {
                Material {
                    Diffuse [_Color]
                }
                Lighting On
            }
        }
    }

But when I look at the inspector, the "Main Color" is always white (1,1,1,1).

Here's how it works, in the Inspector. Whenever you switch the shader, it behaves as if Material.CopyPropertiesFromMaterial was used. So, any similarly-named properties in your new shader will inherit the values from the last shader that had them. Color is not white by default. The reason your default is overwritten, as white, is that the default material has a property named "_Color", and it is set to white by default. When you assign our own material, your "_Color" property won't be respected, so defining it is basically useless, but unfortunately necessary to not produce an error.

I believe the problem here is that whenever you create a new Material it defaults to the Diffuse shader.

If you create a new material, change the color to 0,0,255,255 (blue) and then change the shader to something else like say, Decal you will see that the color does not change to that shader's default color.

So unless you write an Editor script that somehow automates and creates a Material with your specified shader, and skips defaulting to Diffuse all together, you're always going to start out with white.

I believe this is just something with the system that is built in that allows you to change shaders in your material without losing any custom data that you have created in the Inspector.

Cheers,

==

Hm ... it seems that color *_Color* is somehow predefined to white by Unity. It might be serialized as such. I've added

_Color2 ("Test Color", Color) = (1, 0.5, 0.5, 1)

and that did show up with the correct color. So, my guess would be that you simply have to change the color in the inspector and cannot rely on the default value given in the shader (at least not for *_Color*; for any other variable name it works).