All places are now migrated to Shorelines [Old water sunset]

Updates Announcements
#1

Hi Creators,

Today we are fully sunsetting our old water technology. All places were automatically migrated to Shorelines so you can benefit from its enhanced water quality, making your experience even more immersive. :ocean: This corresponds to “Phase 2” of our previously communicated Migration plan.


Old water (left), Shorelines (right)

:warning: If one of your places uses water and you had not upgraded it to Shorelines before today, you could see the following visual changes:

  • Places using both water and land will now have Shorelines shores and might get some artifacts if they were not manually upgraded before the sunset.

  • Places using only water could have water voxels extend slightly, making water volumes thicker.

Please review the impacts and recommended steps below if this is your case.

Impact on Places With Both Water and Land Voxels

If your place uses both water and land voxels and you had not upgraded it to Shorelines before this sunset, you could see artifacts at your shores, such as water curving down where it meets land, like shown below.

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You can minimize the look of these artifacts by applying the Shorelines Upgrade script in Terrain Editor > “Create” tab > “Upgrade Shorelines” dropdown > “Upgrade” button. While your place already uses Shorelines, this script will slightly extend your shores to minimize visual artifacts.

The Upgrade script will remain available until December 13th 2024 after which it will be fully removed from Studio.

You might still have to make additional adjustments to your shores after executing the Shorelines Upgrade script. For example, you could have to use the Terrain tools to correct areas where the automatic upgrade could not extend water far enough into land.

Impact on Places With Only Water

If your place only uses water voxels and no land voxels, your water voxels might look slightly inflated in the X and Z axis compared to what you had before the sunset, as shown below.

1059×752 52.6 KB

If this is an issue for you, you can subtract the extra water using the Terrain Editor “Edit” tools shown below (Terrain Editor > Edit > 
). For more information see our Terrain Editor documentation.

:blue_heart: As always, please let us know if you encounter any issues while trying to upgrade with Shorelines ahead of the deprecation.

72 Likes
#2

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#3

Awesome! Glad this new feature has taken full effect. Shorelines look so much better than old water!

7 Likes
#4

Great! Now sunset voxel terrain and replace it with something thats competitive to engines like unity or unreal engine

9 Likes
#5

Great to see the new improvements are global, but sea foam when?

2 Likes
#6

Terrain made out of square voxels got removed 7 years ago

The reason why Unity or Unreal has “good” terrain is because its a mesh. The same trick every engine since Source has used. Roblox actually doesn’t prerender terrain to meshes, it stores all the terrain data. Unless roblox wants to spend a ton of money on prerendering terrain to meshes and storing several gb place files in their cloud for super high resolution terrain (so it doesn’t appear as block as current terrain) we aren’t getting high resolution terrain stored as meshes.

15 Likes
#7

Well it stores the data in a voxel structure thats what i mean.

1 Like
#8

ngl I missed square voxel terrain for a while when it got removed, but I got used to things the way they are now. The old square voxel terrain had such an unique distinct style which allowed to create unique stylized blocky games.

2 Likes
#9

Awesome new feature, this will definitely make experiences way more immersive.

#10

Now this is what I call a good update.

1 Like
#11

It makes sense to sunset the old system.

The new one is far more accurate, and the sticky jello behavior of the previous system isn’t something you’d necessarily want to keep.

1 Like
#12

Cool update! It’s more realistic now!

#14

This is my only real issue with this migration, it makes working with water when primarily working with parts worse.

All in all what I really want is water with sharp edges so that they can be used anywhere with no need for a 5-stud border around it.

#16

Even Smooth Terrain is still made out of voxels. Each voxel just has an occupancy value that can range from 0 to 1, instead of having to be a specific shape.

#17

hence why I said “square voxels” instead of voxels

“voxel terrain” is usually used to refer to minecraft like terrain since almost all engines store terrain in voxel grids

#18

lol. these voxels are still square. Legacy Terrain had voxels that were shapes. Smooth Terrain has voxels that are percentages. They are still in a regular grid and still technically “square”. It’s just that the shape of the terrain is generated from these percentages rather than being directly built out of shapes.

#19

So cool!
I still remember when this first came out lol

#20

Much welcomed & appreciated. I have a question tho

Are there any plans in the future for running water
 as in falling down-stream or downwards?

Asking a bit much
 as I think it could be memory intensive, but there sure are many games that can be added with that.