Thanks everyone for joining us and sharing your thoughts and questions. This was really fun! Please keep the input flowing, and we look forward to connecting with you more in the future. Your feedback is a vital part of our work, and allowing the creation of anything, anywhere, by anyone.
Until next time!
Nick and Tian
Hi Creators,
This is Nick (@skywise84) and Tian (@lowercasecreator), Engineering and Product Leaders for Creator at Roblox and we are excited to host today’s Ask Me Anything (AMA). We are here to answer your questions around the changes announced at this year’s Roblox Developers Conference (RDC) and our recent Creator Roadmap Update.
We will be answering questions from 12 pm to 2 pm PT. In an effort to ensure we can get to as many questions as possible, we ask you to please keep to one question per message.
We know there are currently many questions about the future of Marketplace and that’s why we’ll be sharing a DevForum post on this soon. We ask that you save your questions on Marketplace for this dedicated post.
We are constantly building at Roblox, and are focused on one massive goal — enabling the creation of anything, anywhere, by anyone.
This AMA is for you. We look forward to providing answers and clarity as well as hearing your thoughts and ideas.
While I certainly agree that some features need to be restricted to 13+ users, there is currently no way for <13 accounts to verify their account with an ID, which should be proof enough to have their age updated. This is severely impacting my and many other developers’ experience on Roblox.
Thank you for the opportunity to ask. This issue is very important to me and many others.
At RDC, it was mentioned that the Creator Marketplace will use fiat at the beginning of next year. When this happens, will we be able to sell all types of assets instead of just plugins? Or will that happen later in the year?
Will there ever be a time that we can sell models, audios, decals, etc and not just plugins on the Roblox marketplace for Robux? I’d love to be able to sell asset packs, and other similar things in an easy to get to place.
I want to start by saying: thank you for the announced changes to the creator marketplace. I remember mentioning this to you at RDC but it bears repeating. The changes you announced are huge and solve long-standing issues. I’m sure I speak for the entire community when I say that these changes are much appreciated.
The questions:
A large portion of the creator base (teenagers) likely do not have control over a bank account of their own. If developers are required to cash out to a bank account before purchasing development goods with fiat, this could be a problem. Can revenue earned on-platform be used for buying plugins and other development goods, without having to go via a bank account?
In my recent video, I run some numbers on plugin dev wages. Part of the reason why the old marketplace didn’t make business sense was not just the bureaucracy, but also because creators were compelled to match the prices of others, who tended to price too low. How do you plan to help keep pricing in the creator marketplace sustainable and livable for creators?
Also - I’m enthusiastic - when can we get it? I’m itching for it!
How does Roblox plan to address security and safety concerns around requiring its developers to verify their accounts with phone numbers and IDs? It seems like they’re only being added to more and more features.
I would like to know how the Accessory Adjustment Tool is going to work. Will it allow you to position the accessories by using tools similar to how you move and scale parts in studio?
A question about “Roblox Connect”, which was announced and showcased at RDC.
Will Roblox Connect support groups (group calls w/ multiple people)? Something similar to popular communication applications, so users don’t have to rely on third-party applications, or roblox VC for in-game communication.
This is a bit of a technical question so it probably won’t get answered but – is the redesigned Studio based on QT 6? or is it still QT 5? Maybe based on a completely different framework? Asking this because most of Studio’s issues (especially the issues with hidpi displays and docking) seem to arise from the fact that it’s still on QT 5
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?
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
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?
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):
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.
Are there any plans to add long missing UI features, such as ImageBlur, Acrylic, and precise UIcorner editing?
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)
Are there any plans allow the upload of .gif files?
How much of a priority is it to improve Hyperion to patch more exploits which lead to executors/injectors continuing to work?
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.
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?
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!
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.
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!
