Allow us to use :GetPlatform()

I know this is marked as solved but there are legitimate use cases that nobody brought up in the post. A use case I would very much like to see is the ability to save game settings per device instead of per user. If a player has a high-end computer and a low-end phone and they play a game on both devices, the phone should not be coerced into loading the player’s settings based on what they chose on their computer, just so the player can join the game, have terrible frames because they turned everything up to the max, and have to manually turn on a low-quality mode that they will end up turning off again once they rejoin on their computer. Another use case is to literally display what platform the user is on to other players through GUIs, which many games do, but not always correctly. A developer might also take advantage of Roblox’s $0.99 for R$80 option when buying Robux that only appears on mobile devices, and decide to promote certain developer products more than others on different platforms. It’s a useful feature to have, and the fact that amateur developers will misuse it just isn’t enough to justify locking it behind Roblox script security for me.

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I think the post marked as a solution covers why you should not handle it by platform: Platform does not tell you about someone’s performance. Some people happen to have multiple devices with the same platform but vastly different specs. For this use case, you really should create a feature request about device-specific storage.

That is an interesting one, but still has the same maintenance issues when a new platform is created, and also assumes this option stays the same. An API that tells you the Robux purchasing options seems more future-facing than you just assuming a given platform has it, and maintaining this list of platforms.

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So you want :GetPlatform() to discriminate against player hardware? Hell no.

CastShadow doesn’t lag current modern phones, more importantly is for you to optimise your game in general instead of changing it per platform basis. Most games have user customiseable settings for these type of graphical improvements.

There is no reason to have :GetPlatform() because platform does not determine hardware. I could be playing Roblox on a Potato PC and an Extremely Performant Asus Phone with built in fans.

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Considering Platform.WiiU Platform.Chromecast and Platform.DOS exist, I don’t think it was made for the public to be able to use it.

Those values were added as a joke to discourage people from actually thinking any of the values are meaningful in some way. (since that would also potentially be stock-price moving if you could predict from API changes if support for a platform was coming)

E.g. Roblox added a bunch of obviously-not-used values to not give the false impression early that PlayStation support was coming. If they had just added “PlayStation” and not the others it would have been extremely obvious they were working on PlayStation support at the time.

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No I just imagined how other people who make free models would use it.

In that case it’s interesting that DOS, NX, and BoOS even exist. BeOS was discontinued in the early 2000s, NX is an operating system for network switches, and DOS is… dos. All 3 Roblox would never run on and nobody would assume it would ever. Playstation happened and WiiU was possible at the time but all of the 3 systems I mentioned are all really old or never made for gaming.

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I just explained this, they are all added as jokes.

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You could just monitor average fps and reduce graphics (disabling shadows and stuff) depending on the average fps.

Some android devices are powerful, reducing graphics for all android devices would just be unfair and stupid.

And some iOS devices are really laggy, so why shouldn’t they have degraded graphics too?

It would be better than discriminating different Operating systems, wouldn’t it?

I’m pretty sure that’s why Roblox locked this function.

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