3D Paths/splines

Hello everybody,
I’ve been recently working on train game in Unity, and Unity engine has this amazing Spline class in it, which we on Roblox platform are lacking. Some time ago Roblox introduced 2d paths, which are useful, like in “Scratch” -like plugins or when showing some linear data, like updates.

Here are few things, that 3d splines would allow developers to easier create:

  • Train games
  • AI Traffic, you can script a vehicle model randomly follow a spline and create more realistic traffic games, like bus or driving games.
  • Basic planet rotation for space games. If planets are purely decoration, this would easily add basic planet rotation.
  • Basic cutscene animations

Currently to achieve something above would require making or using 3rd party modules, which are not always best when compared to built-in options. While I’ve search a little on forum if somebody had previously mentioned in feature requests for something similar, I found out, that Roblox had showcased rail constraint in one hack week video. Some staff mentioned that they are working on them steadily, tho they didn’t have ETA at that moment, that comment was many years ago since now.

If Roblox were to add 3d splines, it would cut some games development time, having to create custom system for pathing. I doubt that any 3rd party plugin could make good controls for editing the splines, by having standalone, creatable instance, with it’s own properties would also be more welcoming than having some complex and unreadable stringvalue/numbervalue data structure somewhere in serverstorage made by a plugin.

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Announced at RDC 2021

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You can already make n-dimensional splines using FloatCurves.
https://create.roblox.com/docs/reference/engine/classes/FloatCurve

A built-in class also already exists for 3-dimensional curves.
https://create.roblox.com/docs/reference/engine/classes/Vector3Curve

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does this mean it’s never dropping

no i think they just forgot, im waiting for the next physics announcement to remind them that they still haven’t released rail constraints

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i also was reminded today that for some reason people still do CFrame trains where they’ll weld your character when they’re moving because they arent using physics constraints properly
i thought people had learned how to use AlignPosition and AlignOrientation at this point

As I said in the post, they we’re announced and at some point somebody asked if they we’re being worked on, Roblox Staff said that they are working on it, but don’t have ETA. That message was many years ago.
I don’t have the direct link to that message currently.

This is pretty cool, haven’t noticed that once, even though I’ve red thru the documentation multiple times.
Tho issue is that, there is no visual tool to edit the curves. My original post is meant to request a visual tool as well as value type for splines, but it seems like the value type is already implamented.

Thank you for the links.

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