As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to building.
Just building. Specifically catwalks and pathways.
Beyond The Dark from Alpha Strike Group as an example:
I believe that there’s more that they’ve used other than just the programs listed in the documentation. Programs are not enough for me. If someone tells me they’ve used Blender to create this. Then I have questions such as, how they created it in Blender.
I believe there are some Roblox Studio plugins and Blender plugins they’ve used to create all of this.
Not sure why there’s a stair
I am not sure, if they manually placed this all, or used a tool to do it.
But if there would be a tool, it would simplify everything regarding this.
Copy pasting the catwalk piece by piece, is possible and do-able. But sometimes I refuse to believe that someone has actually done it. Because if you’d change something on it, without a package, you’d have to re-copy paste everything.
But let’s say you want to extend the length of something? Then it would rely on the position of the pivot I think. But even then it would overlap. It’s not really connected in a rail.
I mean with Tile Meshes they’d just render as a flat plane, because the length wouldn’t match anymore, but if created differently, you could store this data per tile.
You could store the start position of the tile as a node and the end position. And then place the next tile based on the end position of the other node. I think in that way, if any package or local package (if they implement it), would not overlap but update correctly.
It’s not only copy pasting, but the precise positioning and all. I haven’t seen a snap tool in Studio or anything that relies on creating symetrical and even spaced things.
If this issue is addressed, it would improve my development experience because it would simplify building.
I wouldn’t have to copy paste the same thing anymore, and it would be more flexible to do changes.
Tile Meshes is a term used in Valve’s Source 2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ki67VLL0xI
https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/ishp6q/i_was_fascinated_with_the_mesh_based_tilsets_used/
It’s a Tileset and Tileset based editing.
It’s a collection of presets that are mapped. The presets contain all directions of something. This could be a set of Pipes, Roads, Fences, Catwalks, anything basically.
But not things like Trees, those are more an object on its own.
Then with a feature, you can place things like Pipes, just from quads, that will then smartly form the pipes, based on the mapped preset.
A tileset could look like this
Just that in this example, there are also nodes in the preset. As example, if your Pipe path placement ends. You could place and ending, instead of an open hole.
Though it would be required to think this through on how to implement it.
Here it’s editing meshes, with extrusion. But basically if the length of a thing doesn’t match, it doesn’t render.
Those are the sort of limitations.
If Roblox would implement this. Note that tilesets can have variations and properties
This is just an idea. But tileset is the base concept of the feature request.
In Roblox it could be something like this
https://devforum.roblox.com/t/automatic-tile-updating/1814536
Just with meshes. I mean Union parts can work as well. But ideally meshes.
Good things this would do
- You don’t have to do some mathematic position synced Blender editing.
- You only need to export a preset of something, e.g. Pipes as a Mesh. You don’t have to export 100 meshes for different placed meshes. Instead you just make a tileset and place them in Studio.
- The client only has to cache models of the tileset instead of a thousand.
It would be cool if this can also work with Parts and Union, while the Meshes are more ideal for this, not everyone would try this feature with meshes.
This would be easy plus flexible since it would be “Package” based. Just not with the current Packages. Local Packages or a mixture would be better, or Roblox’s Cloud API is going to freak out, along with a developers inventory.