Hey guys! Thanks for doing another one of these. It’s always awesome to be able to ask the both of you questions directly.
While answering a question during his Q&A at RDC, Dave brought up the possibility of Luau being used as a shader language in the future. Allowing developers to author shaders using Luau is something that’s been requested time and time again, year after year after year. The last “official” statement we have regarding it is from @zeuxcg’s 2016 devforum post where he basically said “this is probably not happening, ever.” This RDC marks the first instance (to my knowledge) that Dave has ever publicly acknowledged this feature as a possibility and so there’s this renewed sense of hope that it may happen at some point.
Has there been any additional effort, research, investigation, or development put into “LSL” internally at Roblox? If so, is there any information you can share on it at this time?
My questions are about the recently announced Shopify x Roblox integration from the keynotes at RDC
Is there plans to post a roadmap soon for this integration to keep creators posted?
I’m getting ready to launch my first physical products with some amazing partners soon and the topic of ecommerce on Roblox is one I’m super interested in connecting with relevant teams on.
I was really excited about the “Text To Speech” API coming out soon, and noticed that the voices sounded very robotic in the preview. Is this subject to change? Also would we get options of different voice types / accents to choose from?
Also, I was wondering if unlike plugins, if we would still have the option to have experiences set as a Robux amount to enter as well as a real currency fee? I was saddened when I learned that plugins can ONLY cost real money now, and there was no option to pay in Robux.
When can we expect to see UGC creators get more of a fair revenue split, similar to what game developers see? Right now, Roblox still takes over 90% of UGC creator revenue, making it impossible for most creators to make meaningful earnings off of their creations.
With the upcoming party system having a feature that looks like a VC chat room system in friend chat, would we potentially see the ability to voice call players in the same format? Like push a “call” button and a player can accept or deny?
There’s a bunch of people here that want their questions answered – please don’t take up so much reading space with such a long rant-ey post. This is not a good faith reply and it’s disrespectful to other forum posters who have questions.
Filters & Tags is an industry standard when it comes to content discovery. Why is it not on Roblox? Is the core value of “tak[ing] the long view” the hold up? I fear this is a particular decision by someone at Roblox to stray away from transparency and user action in favor of ‘Semantic Search’, which I deem to be a flawed vision.
Imagine Filtering by Price (hopefully robux or USD), Server Size, Genre, etc. Not just one sort made by Roblox. That’s the system for 10 percent of the gaming market. That’s the system for a billion users.
What does the future of UGC look like on the platform with respect to game compatibility? You mentioned new scaling controls, but how robust will this really be given how inventive creators are? Is there any tech ready to talk about at this point?
Right now, there seems to be an unstoppable problem with people bypassing avatar accessories and clothing to the point where games are now starting to simply outright turn off UGC. This is the new “cat and mouse” problem. We can imagine systems such as “separated categories for standardized versus outlandish UGC” + “multiple avatars” + “games choosing the type of UGC they allow”, but what direction does Roblox plan to pursue? Will we only be getting stronger scaling and hitbox controls, or are there other ideas currently in motion?
With giant spongebobs in the sky, it’s hard to imagine one generic avatar scaling solution will be enough.
My other question about the Shopify x Roblox integration is below
** When do you guys plan to post information regarding payment splits? (or any other associated fees?) **
I imagine there is a lot of parties that all want a cut of each sale (Shopify, Roblox, Appstores, etc) so I’m curious how this dilutes the creator’s margins.
Hey there, is there any plan to add a new API for planar/screen space reflection or proper cubemap reflections? The current one we have for indoor environment mapping is very outdated and visually looks very inaccurate.
Last q&a, you guys said PBR was coming soon for UGC accessories. It’s been a while and we still haven’t received any updates. Is there any timeline for that?
What plans are there to increase user privacy over the next year? At RDC, a Streamer Mode was teased for Star Creators, and while it’s a great first step, I’d love to see this mindset applied across the entire platform. The amount of harassment I’ve gotten for having a little blue Verified icon next to my username is ridiculous.
Now that Roblox seems to be giving more to paid access games, will we ever be allowed to advertise paid games via sponsorships? I’d love to work on more involved projects but having to purely advertise on off-site platforms (twitter, tiktok, etc.) tends to be a hit and miss if we have to purely rely on 3rd party algorithms and people remembering that the game exists.
