The Issue
Imagine you’re creating an MMORPG. It will contain trees, lots of trees!
So you rather just create one tree and copy it all over the place.
Then after creating 13 worlds (all in same server) you realized the tree isn’t fully touching the ground, now you’d have to go back and edit every single tree in all 13 worlds to fix it.
Then you realized it’s suppose to have an extra branch with leafs. Now you give up on going back to replace the old trees and you realize it’s rather pointless to build a big world in roblox.
What I suggest is
Allow models to be linked.
If I copy a model by link then the copied model will change if I change the original model. I am not able to edit the linked model at all. I must edit the source model if I want any changes.
Add a model center node
Inside models you should be able to create an attachment called Root. Doing this is optional.
This attachment can be moved in two ways:
Move the offset of the model (set where the base is)
Move the actual model by dragging the attachment.
If you don’t have a root attachment, moving models will use default boundingbox behaivour.
Results
With this function I can create a tree, paste a ton of linked copies of it in all worlds. Then when the tree isnt touching the ground, I move the Root node inside the original model to adjust for the offset.
Then I just add another branch with leafs to the original model and voila! It’s fixed in all 13 worlds! Genious!!
Right now in my game Reason 2 Die I place a brick on which an ammobox is spawned. It works but it doesn’t show the ammobox in build mode so building scenery this way isn’t really optimal. With this addition we could start building real big worlds on roblox!
This prefab/blueprint type behavior for models is extremely helpful, and fortunately is very simple to implement yourself. While I do agree that an official featured would be nice, it will always remain one with many edge-cases and developer specific desired behaviors that cannot be covered by the default system, which probably means these developers will resort to self-made systems either way.
Would be nice to have, but I think development time for such a huge feature is better spent on systems such as mesh LOD’s which is similiar but achieves so much more. If your main motivation is to have a better experience in plopping down your models while visually seeing what they would look like once spawned, you can already do that with a plugin. I’m currently working on such a system/plugin for map builders and it’s actually quite fun, haven’t come across anything that can’t be done with the features in place already.
If I copy a model by link then the copied model will change if I change the original model. I am not able to edit the linked model at all. I must edit the source model if I want any changes.
This is the exact reason why I wouldn’t want this feature to be officially implemented like this. If you stamp one of your templated models and make changes to it, those should be remembered and be kept when the template model changes. To do this properly, references must be kept between assets which is very impractical due to the “copy / publish / re-use everything” development style on Roblox.
(and regarding your tree problem; assuming you have some sort of consistent folder/model structure in your maps it will be 2 minutes worth of work to move or replace them all, especially if they are all in the same server)
(just want to say that I do like this feature suggestion, i just think its impractical for Roblox)
The whole point of this feature is to edit the source and affect all linked copies. If you don’t want this behaivour you can just copy it normally (aka. unlinked).
But I do agree, a plugin is one way of doing it. And a convinient way too!
Reason I suggest this is because of it’s fundamental building properties.
Going to be releasing my prefab plugin sometime after Christmas when I have time to finish the extra tools for it in case this is never happening. Got backed up with helping someone learn C# so forgive me fam.
