Add a toggle to disable specific special effect types from avatar accessories

Feature Requests Engine Features
#1

As a Roblox developer, it is currently hard to deal with certain special effects included in avatar accessories created by Roblox over the platform’s long history, including particles, sounds, and even lights, which have the potential to be disruptive in certain types of experiences.

Over the platform’s history, Roblox has released many different avatar accessories that include special effects, such as particles, sounds, and lights. Some of these accessories are Limited items that are very expensive and sought after due to their effects (some are frequently resold for over 1 million Robux!). On Roblox, a majority of experiences allow users to bring their platform level avatar into the experience, including all of the special effects that their avatar accessories include. In a lot of experiences, these effects aren’t disruptive at all, and are just a really cool and unique part of player’s avatars, however, in certain types of experiences, particularly those where you are competing against other players, these effects can be distracting, or even give the player wearing these items a small competitive edge.

Developers should not have to account for the existence of this small pool of avatar items, and should have an easy way to toggle specific effects within their experiences. Roblox should add a toggle, perhaps within StarterPlayer properties (or elsewhere within experience settings) that allow developers to disable or otherwise control different types of effects individually. The reason that there should be different toggles for each effect type (eg Particles, Sounds, and Lights) is because each effect type may or may not be disruptive in an experience. Developers should have the choice to decide which effect types to allow in their experiences.

Just to clarify, this is not a request to remove any effects from any of Roblox’s accessories. Owners of these items should be able to continue using these effects within experiences that allow them, as these effects are what make the items special and highly sought after. Removing them outright would be unfair to those who purchased them, and in my opinion, Roblox has the responsibility to continue support for these items, while at the same time, giving developers tools to disable the effects that could be disruptive in their experiences.

If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because developers would be able to easily toggle specific avatar accessory effect types that they determine to be disruptive in their experiences, and players would be able to continue using their items with special effects across all experiences, with the effects only disabled in experiences that choose to do so.

20 Likes
PointLight erroneously removed from "Egg of Destiny"
#2

Just a little more information I didn’t think should go in the main body of this feature request.

I made this feature request by suggestion of this post in the Bug Reports category of the DevForum:

As a longtime Roblox player, I think it’s really important to preserve the features of legacy avatar items that people paid a lot of Robux for. At the same time, as a Roblox developer, I understand that certain effects in avatar items can be disruptive in experiences. This is why I think a toggle that allows developers to have control over these effects in their experiences is the best solution for everyone.

For those that weren’t aware that there were items with these types of effects to begin with, here’s some info about 2 of the different effect types:

Items with sounds:

Released in 2010, plays various soda related sounds when equipped on an avatar.

Also released in 2010, plays chicken sounds when equipped on an avatar.

Again, released in 2010, plays a set of harmonica noises when equipped.

Released in 2015, came out of a mystery gift sold for Robux during the Bloxtober 2015 event. Plays different laughing sounds when equipped.

Items with Lights:

Released in 2014, as a part of an April Fools day event, has a purple light in experience.

Released in 2015, came out of a 31,000 Robux mystery gift sold during the Bloxtober 2015 event. Has a orange / yellowish light in experience.

Items with Particles:

Wayyyy too many to name. There are probably well over 100 by this point, all with various different types of particles.

3 Likes
#3

I do agree there should be a toggle that allows developers to decide whether its allowed in games or not, I have items with sounds and particles myself and i don’t want them to be permanently removed either. A toggle would be so easily be able to be implemented since theres already scripts that do that exact same thing that developers put in games if they so wish dont want particles or sound from hats affecting gameplay

2 Likes
#4

I feel like the sound hats’ rolloff distance shouldn’t be further than the default rolloff distance for voice chat. I’ve always found the sound hats annoying because you can hear them from a mile away.

#5

Not sure how realistic this is, but it would be nice if beyond just outright disabling sounds in accessories, you could configure the distance they can be heard from or the overall volume. I had a similar thought with particles specifically, being able to control the max allowed amount of particles per emitter (or character) would be a nice option over only being able to disable them entirely.

#6

Would love to see developers given better tools to manage special effect items. If you want to do this on your own, there’s no resources about this on the Roblox Creator Hub, and even unofficial sources miss a lot of edge cases.

Newer hats use ParticleEmitters and Trails, but older hats still use old fashioned Sparkles, Fire, and Smoke objects. Some hats put particles directly in the handle, while others tuck them away inside an attachment. The Mushirio Nightwatchman bundle includes separate particles inside the UpperTorso and LowerTorso! All four sound hats, along with rbadam’s Smokestack Top Hat, run new scripts to activate their special effects.

I’m sure there’s more I’m missing, but I think that’s a sign of why it’s important Roblox ties everything together into an accessible option. If I can’t note down every special effect item as a longtime hat collector, how are new devs supposed to deal with this?

3 Likes
#7

I don’t want these removed permanently either, so a toggle would be nice

Here’s a script for this in the meantime

if CONFIGURATION.SanitizeAccessories then
			for _, accessory: Accessory in humanoid:GetAccessories() do
				for _, descendant: Instance in accessory:GetDescendants() do
					if BLACKLIST[descendant.ClassName] then
						descendant:Destroy()
					end
				end
			end
		end


"BLACKLIST": {
				"String": "{\"Script\":true,\"ParticleEmitter\":true,\"Fire\":true,\"Sound\":true,\"Sparkles\":true}"
			},