Change InsertService:GetFreeDecals() to use the updated asset APIs, or expose a new similar API to Lua

Feature Requests Engine Features
#1

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to provide a user friendly interface to using custom images. This can come up for features like letting people spray labels, put up paintings in their house, etc.

Ideally, a user would be able to just search for what they want (like “cat”) and get results. There is an API for this, InsertService:GetFreeDecals, an API so obscure that not only is its return type documented as “odd”, but googling for it will show you a tweet I made just mentioning it before other people using it.

Surprisingly, given its age, it actually works, but it uses an ancient asset API, and gives pretty garbage results.

Compare the toolbox results for “cat”:

image
image283×791 79.1 KB

…with the InsertService:GetFreeDecals() results for cat.

image
image755×292 66.6 KB

I hope it is possible to update GetFreeDecals() to use the new APIs so that the results are reasonable. GetFreeDecals() is pretty janky, so I would also not mind if there was just a new API for it.

You can use a Roblox proxy to work around this, but this should not be required and comes with its own suite of issues.

13 Likes
In Game Image Search API
Add a good way to search for music and sound effects as distinct categories in experience
#2

I want them to provide us access to the ToolboxService APIs. I wouldn’t mind a Lua-based service that hooks into /v1/toolbox-service or whatever the API is.

We got SearchCatalog, why not go the full way and let us search the toolbox as well?

3 Likes
#3

How can I use a Roblox Proxy to work around this? This is the only post about :GetFreeDecals and it’s incredibly buggy. Doesn’t show past the second page of results and gives terrible results like you said. Also half of searches dont even work they have to be extremely basic words