Creator Roadmap - AMA with Nick and Tian [Oct 4, 2023]

Hi Nick & Tian, love these AMAs!

With the announcement of the Banning API at this last RDC, I am curious to learn more about it.
Specifically, whether or not this is a combination of internal Lua APIs (like Player:Kick()) and a web panel for developers, like in developer stats.

If there is a web panel involved, is it planned for it to be customizable for who can access/manage bans?

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Are there any plans dealing with restrictive nature of environment aspects, such as lights, skybox, and post processing?

The lighting currently suffers a lot from the following aspects i found:

  • No way to adjust attenuation (basically the curve at which the light energy dissipates over distance)
  • Cannot go over the light range of 60 studs, which makes it infuriating to light up large places
  • Specular factor control (basically how much specular a light gives off to the surfaces)
  • Spotlight shape softness

As for the skybox:

  • No way to add a dedicated night skybox or make it procedural (although atmosphere instance exists, it doesnt provide that much of the functionality)
  • Cannot adjust skybox’s energy for either day or night (basically how bright that skybox is)

And for post-processing:

  • Not much effects to play with.
    • I really don’t know how to describe this but UI’s and just in general we lack the effects that would enhance visuals of the game like for example sharpening or RGB split, or maybe dithering and noise overlay. We can’t blend UI’s either.

Sorry if this all seems poorly worded, if clarification is needed, I can answer those

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Are there any plans to allow developers to use different material variants for terrain simultaneously? Currently, you are limited to using only one variant of each material for the entire game. Additionally, will you also enable us to paint the 3D grass over any material, rather than just the grass material?

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Will we see anything related to GUI API?


Examples:

  • Pixel color at screen point
  • Invert/Mirror images/UI elements (via negative size) (Especially ViewportFrame)
  • UI render effects (such as blur)
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First off, thanks for trying to improve clarity and community communication. I think it’s essential to try and get feedback from everybody, and I’m glad to see if starting to happen more. As for the questions, I only have a few basic ones (mostly relating to UI design):

  1. Will we ever be able to expect a native Figma importer solution? Now that VSCode support is being added along with Git, I think something to allow us to make UI in Figma or other tools such as Adobe XD is past due. I’m using a 3rd party plugin at the moment which is half broken, I’d love official support.

  2. Are there any plans to add long missing UI features, such as ImageBlur, Acrylic, and precise UIcorner editing?

  3. With the new VideoFrames, will we be able to use them inside of ScreenGuis? (Ignore this if it already exists, I haven’t been able to use it yet)

  4. Are there any plans allow the upload of .gif files?

  5. How much of a priority is it to improve Hyperion to patch more exploits which lead to executors/injectors continuing to work?

  6. With the Studio redesign in “early 2024”, will it add improved UX over the current Stufio? Will it address long standing bugs?

That’s all I have for now, thanks for doing one of these once again.

12 Likes

Hello there,

With the upcoming release of customizable grass height, does this also mean we will be able to have different grass heights in different areas? For example, the left side of the map has short grass, while the right side has tall grass. Additionally, will we ever be able to change the texture of the grass in the near future?

Thank you.

8 Likes

Hello Nick and Tian, thanks for hosting this AMA!

I was wondering what the plans are for DynamicImage and DynamicMesh, is there any estimation for a release date or for some kind of announcement surrounding those two? I’m really looking forward to it, I’ve had a lot of fun testing them out but I would love to be able to use them in a real game!

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Any plans for actually expanding the engine past the current limitations and issues it has right now? Right now it’s very hard to see a future in witch ROBLOX can allow the creation of large, detailed and complex experiences without running into heavy performance issues and engine limitations. While you guys will often praise showcase experiences (like most of roblox), it’s pretty clear that those experiences somehow suffer from performance issues while not really offering a visual fidelity more advanced than what could be seen on something like Crysis 1 (2007 AAA game) while even STILL having an area of exploration 50 by 50 studs at BEST. Other games that do try to offer higher visual fidelities, larger worlds, etc… often have to rely on hacky optimization tricks that can easily chip away at the games quality in an attempt to make the unreasonably low performance engine take away resources. Another issue i have seen with the ROBLOX engine (and that will continue to be accentuated) would be the fact that the engine itself keeps getting more and more bloated with new features that are forced to have baked into their games regardless of not those features will ever be used. I do not believe simply having a “Disable” button is enough as even THEN those features will be present in memory and still take away some valuable resources regardless.

With all of this, i personally do not believe ROBLOX itself can go too far without tripping over most obstacles due to the lack of a proper game engine. Would there be any chance of the ROBLOX engine getting a major “rewrite” or something similar (in order to alleviate the issues it has right now)? Would there be any chance for ROBLOX themselves to take a more “modular” and “open” approach with the engine so developers have way more access to everything? While i do understand that opening the engine up would leave the chance for many bad actors to create many relatively “harmful” experiences, i personally believe that these sorts of risks have to be taken in order to elevate the engine AND the developer space to higher grounds for a better future.

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Hey darkpixlz,

Thanks for sharing your questions. To ensure we’re engaging with as many creators as possible we ask that everyone keep to one question per message. Can you reduce or consolidate? Thanks so much!

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Any more plans with highlights? I asked last AMA and didn’t get a response. There’s a limit of 31 highlights and they don’t work on mobile. We really want to use this feature more broadly.

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Will we get more control over terrain?


Examples:

  • More water properties, such as flow direction.
  • Being able to modify water/grass uniquely from one area to another. (Non-global properties)
  • Ability to edit voxel size. (Including smaller than 4 studs)
11 Likes

Hello again! Thanks for doing another AMA :slight_smile:

Since I just found out about this AMA right now, I’ll post an abridged version of my primary question, which is the same thing I asked dave in-person at RDC (which did not result in a response with any meaningful substance) : When will transparency and communications about the status of programs improve for the better, and what is Roblox actively doing right now to achieve those? Right now, creators have no way of knowing what’s going on with a given program, where it’s heading, or why it’s being shut down, nor can they give any feedback on them. The accelerator, stars, devawards and verified badge programs have all either randomly halted or been axed, typically with radio silence from Roblox on the matter. This leads to a lot of problems and frustration towards Roblox as a company!

I’m super happy to chat about this problem further if it’s desired, my DMs / email are always open. I have a lot of feedback on this matter that simply would not fit in this reply:

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Are there any plans for us to get more UI features such as sliders, UI blur, etc?

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I realise I was meant to keep to one question per post. Unfortunately I can’t edit my post (why can’t you edit posts in slow mode - the purported reasoning doesn’t make sense if you only present the limitation after the post is written), so I guess I posted three questions. Whoops.

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Due to the slowmode I was unable to edit, here’s the post again;

First off, thanks for trying to improve clarity and community communication. I think it’s essential to try and get feedback from everybody, and I’m glad to see if starting to happen more. As for the questions, I only have a few basic ones (mostly relating to UI design):

  1. Will we ever be able to expect a native Figma importer solution? Now that VSCode support is being added along with Git, I think something to allow us to make UI in Figma or other tools such as Adobe XD is past due. I’m using a 3rd party plugin at the moment which is half broken, I’d love official support. Along with that, will we see the built in Figma features (such as Blur, both Layer Blur and Background Blur (acrylic) ) imported properly into this as well? The reason we couldn’t get this years ago was due to “performance”. All modern iPhones and most modern Androids use Acrylic material in their home/lockscreens, so there’s no reason that Roblox can’t run it because of performance anymore. Layer blur is useful for menus and images, and background blur is useful for effects such as acrylic blur.

That’s all I have for now, thanks for doing one of these once again.

1 Like

I’m interested in learning more about this upcoming update in particular:

  • Community-led Marketplace - Anyone can publish avatar items to the Marketplace (Late 2023)

Have the conditions that must be met in order to publish avatar items to the marketplace been determined and if so, what are they (ex. “Any fee to pay (ex. 750R$) per UGC upload?”, “Active Premium subscription requirement?”, “Asset geometry requirements (ex. vert. tri. etc. limit)?” etc.). I was thinking perhaps the current conditions would change for the public release by tightening or loosening the current upload requirements. Maybe it’ll just stay the same. Would appreciate a clarification.

I’m interested in learning this information so that I am prepared for the update as a Roblox user interested in investing into UGC.

4 Likes

Will there be any new rendering capabilities?


Examples:

  • New rendering effects. (e.g. Warping effect.)
  • Custom render effects written in Lua.
  • Render order. (Being able to change the layer that something is rendered on, so it can be in front or behind of other objects.)
  • Masking. (Being able to “cut off” a part of an object, and hopefully UI elements too, without actually cutting it off. Just preventing a masked part from rendering/being visible. There are other uses for masking too.)
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Hello hello! I know there are plans to rework groups “from the ground up” and was wondering if you all could provide any more information on what this entails?

I currently am the owner of a group that holds all the experiences I’ve created. I’d like to have more granular control on which developers can interact with the places under the group. Right now I have to give developers access to all the places under the group if for example they want to upload an animation to it. There’s also the issue with distributing group funds, is there plans to add the ability to distribute group funds based on an experience and not the entire group funds?

The overall idea would be to treat groups like organizations, and within these organizations could have “groups” that have finer control over experiences. This prevents having to create a new group per project which in return then allows you to grow a centralized fan base in one organization rather than having them spread apart against a lot of different organizations.

This is an area I have always felt was lacking and am excited to hear if any of these changes are planned or are being implemented!

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Not directly related to the announcements made at RDC, but are there any plans to improve on the universal client? Since it’s release 80% of the client is still just a browser pop-up & the performance leaves a lot to be desired.

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Hello again,

As of now, the Export Selection in Studio only allows you to export as a .obj file. Will there ever be support to export as other formats, such as .fbx and .glTF?

Thank you.

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