As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to (quickly) generate complex paths for Instances to follow over several transitions. Paths (also known as masks) are waypoints for an Instance to follow, allowing rotational settings for each individual waypoint.
In my eyes, this could be fairly useful for having a part move in a curvy motion, or in a zig-zag motion, or even an up-down motion, all with once Instance and possibly even a single method.
I believe it could be shown as something that could be shown as dots (like attachments) that point in a direction indicating rotation (or next waypoint position), and could possibly have support for Bezier curves (like the CurveSize0 and CurveSize1 property of Beams). Could it even be initialized on the go for relative pathing? Sure can! 2D-pathing-wise can be illustrated in a way shown using the Pen tool in After Effects, or when simply creating a mask.
Where this could really shine is with GUI objects. Making GUI objects smoothly move along waypoints is rather difficult with what we have at the moment, especially with simplistic movement like tweening. This could open the door to 2D-image based games on roblox, which would then open the other door for a lot more variety on Roblox.
With pathing, we’d be able to allow creations like these:
UI Following complex curves:
Text following complex curves:
All images are embedded with a link to where I obtained them from.
Couldn’t find any sources for 3d pathing.
…and just about everything inbetween. Moving a GuiObject efficiently and beautifully is a bit of a task, requiring geometric functions (cough, arctan), requires a lot of time and effort, and lastly, requires a lot of pain tolerance due to all the headaches you’ll be obtaining when you can’t figure out why your GUI is calculating the mass of the sun, when instead it should simply just be drawing a circle.
Another great way to use paths is with particles. With particles you can draw complex polygons, like stars and circles, and symbols such as an infinity sign. It can allow beams to move that one direction you wanted instead of the confusing Curve sizes, and it can even bring you one step closer to achieving your dream game’s creation.
I’d love to create 2D games, and having paths is necessary. Paths would be able to allow characters or objects to move and navigate through (possibly) curvy or sharp location with ease. This would also allow me to create 2D Shooters like Touhou and Boring Man, or even Undertale or Deltarune if I’m feeling a bit extra. It would allow me to waves under text as a title, of which can look really well in a game if done correctly.
The inability to create paths like these means that I’d have to create small frames or parts to signify where the object should go, and the means of traveling across those paths means that they could only travel linearly, and means that maps can only have linear movement. You may think “Oh, you can just use pathfinding” but I’d like to be the one to define where my humanoid / part will go specifically instead of PathfindingService doing it for me sometimes, as it takes the unwanted route a lot of the time, and it leaves out possible walking effects (such as woozy walking, zig-zags, generally the aformentioned patterns.)
In the context of wavy text, I would have to create all my work in an external image editing software, spritesheet it, set the size values, and deal with the offset showing parts of the previous frame due to spacing error, and then cry myself to sleep. This takes much more work than a program like Adobe After Effects’ ability, which takes just about two clicks to bind a text object to a mask.
And possibly, just possibly, 2D pathing could allow for a makeshift 2D physics system implementation.
If you wish to piggyback off of this, I implore you to. This is missing many functionalities that other people may want, and this was just my two cents on how pathing could be implemented. An idea can’t be put into realization without the community’s effort.