Oddities of Textures vs. Decals

I just recently wanted to make something that required a texture and I thought it would be fairly simple but I have quickly discovered that Textures are odd and quirky animals that probably need some fixes. I’m not sure whether these are bugs but I’m going to list the two oddities that I know so far.

Oddity 1:
Textures act like decals or don’t work on parts that also have a block or sphere mesh in them.

Here is a picture of two parts that are exactly the same except that the part on the right has a block mesh inserted into it.

Here are some pictures of what happens if you use a cylinder or sphere mesh (special set to sphere) and you can see that the sphere does support the tiling

Oddity 2:
While decals will simply place your image on a part, a texture will actually mirror your image if placed on the correct side.


I’m not sure if I like the fact that it mirrors my image. I can see it being useful bit I would rather it be added as an option in the properties.

I feel like Textures are a long-forgotten unattended-to feature. They do not seem to get much appreciation from the ROBLOX developers.

I think Textures and Decals really need to be looked at and gone through an overhaul. They lack properties that allow coloring, using spritesheets, and universal tiling (textures generally don’t work properly on meshes or CSG).

I think that, ideally, there should be just one object to handle all projections of images onto 3D geometry. It could contain tiling properties, spritesheet-related properties, clipping properties, coloring properties, and maybe even directional projection onto 3D geometry rather than choosing from one of six faces.

That’s a lot of work, and I don’t expect it any time soon, but that’s the dream!

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Considering Textures are the main part of most games’ visuals, it’s kind of criminal how long they’ve gone unchanged.

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Also how they really aren’t rendered with the part, which causes all those annoying transparency issues, we can’t rotate them, and they don’t have imagecolor even though surfacegui images do.

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Feature request to prevent any image objects from becoming obsolete ever again.

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