FreeMaterial isn't working

[Rick]

Is there a way to free a material in lua? I've tried FreeMaterial(mat) and mat:Free() and both give me an error saying they don't exist.

[macklebee]

just simply set the material to nil... but you also have to remove it from wherever it was being used by either freeing the mesh or painting that mesh a different material.

[Josh]

Please do not add tags in the thread title.

 

Just set the variable to NULL and it will get cleaned up automagically. You can call collectgarbage() in Lua to force a cleanup after setting the variable:

http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#pdf-collectgarbage

[Rick]

So can I technically do that with all LE entities? Why have :Free() for other entities like meshes then?

 

Please do not add tags in the thread title.

 

Sorry I didn't see a Lua forum but other languages have one so thought I'd give it some more info in the generic forum.

[Josh]

The other language subforums are closed for new topics. They'll be merged into the main programming forum soon.

 

Entities require manual freeing because they have too many linkages to ever be collected by the GC. I'm not a big fan of GC because of things like this.