Roblox is amazing, all games are free and a lot of games are really fun to play with friends. Unfortunately, each friend needs a device to play. So I would like to introduce my solution:
split-screen
Split screen would make playing with friends a lot easier, and would open up possibilities for couch co-op games. It would work like this:
Step one:
Get a controller
Step two:
Go into settings and click a button called (add player)
Step three:
Link the controller and sign into your account (if you have quick switch accounts, you can just pull from there)
Step three:
Enjoy!
I have had many times that I was at my friend’s house wanting to play Roblox, but lacking a device to play, or would much rather just play split screen. Just imagine how many games could be played with friends, here is a list of games I think would be amazing with split screen:
Doors, pressure, phighting, forsaken, notoriety, evade and many more!
Sure this would have some issues that would need solutions, most notably players in different servers and players forcing their way into a game when they are not allowed to, but this could easily be solved by allowing devs to turn on and off split screen
Already doable via viewport frames (although with all the limitations of viewports). In theory its possible to have 9 players at once (Roblox allows checking if input came from one of eight controllers or the keyboard / mouse)
its not doable because you cannot add vfx, lighting, surface guis, or high resolution images (guaranteed) into viewportframs, and probable more limitations that i forgot about. yes its theoretically doable, however very performance heavy with only subpar results and an extreme amount of effort needed from the developer
There’s a difference between doable and having it look good.
Here’s some footage of a prototype system of split screen I worked on a few months ago, and although it doesn’t look good, it does run at a reasonable framerate for me.
Also it would be hard for splitscreen to be included inside of Roblox as a feature, as some things don’t need to run twice on the same device, e.g playing animations, having a copy of all the services including workspace for each client, having two local clients communicate to each other through the server instead of just communicating on the same device, etc.
Therefore it would be better if viewports were improved to give the developer more control of what needs to run once or multiple times in a game and having good looking split screen games,.
Coincidentally I’m actually developing a couch co-op game right now. It doesn’t use splitscreen but with some camera tricks I can keep everyone on screen at once. See here
Can’t share everything because this is like a big part of my game and I don’t want it to all be stolen by the time I finish it but yeah.
In an ideal scenario, split screen support shouldn’t need to require duplicating every service for each individual screen as that would kind of defeat the point (why ask for a dedicated feature if it would have the same downsides of just using a ViewportFrame where we would waste memory on clones of the workspace?)
this is seriously needed, splitscreen is really getting rejected in the modern gaming industry, i would seriously LOVE this to be added for games as an option to turn on (just requires them to change a little bit of code and how their game works)
Most of the ways I play games is through couch coop or pvp, a game I’m looking forward to is mc dungeons 2, and I would not play it if it did not have couch coop
