I know this has been requested maybe 10 times here on many different threads but the lack of normal maps are the primary reason why I don’t use textures as heavily in my game.
Normal maps are what makes the textures not look repetitive since it actually makes it look different on different parts of the whole texture with lighting and camera angle.
I think being able to put normal maps into the game should’ve been made available long ago.
@zeuxcg says that the reason why Roblox won’t add custom normal maps was because it would make mobile platforms crash due to memory issues but shouldn’t that be the developers’ concern instead of Roblox’s? If you’re developing a game for mobile, you should already know that your game must be heavily optimized anyway to be enjoyable on those platforms. You’d know that using normal maps wouldn’t be good for your game and wouldn’t. I don’t think a mobile game without normal maps would loose anything. But PC users can handle the normal maps.
Now if the main reason that you don’t want to add it is because the new lighting system you’re going to be adding next year will be incompatible with something you’d do now or that the time you’d have to spent adding normal maps now would be better spent towards developing then that’s fine.
But just look how much of a difference normal maps make on the realism of the textures:
I’m pretty sure that there were many other developers who wanted to create their own nice texture in the game but were very disappointed when they realized that their textures looked really bad without the normal maps.
So can we please have the ability to put our own normal maps into our games and make them much more pleasing aesthetically?
It could just be another property in the texture instance called NormalMap and we’d put our own normal maps on it as regular images.
The primary blocker on this right now is The Future is Bright. If we implement normal maps now, we have to implement them both for the current lighting and The Future is Bright. The Future is Bright is also in a prototype stage right now, so any normal maps implemented in the current prototype are subject to be completely reworked later.
Normal maps will have to wait until the current lighting system is gone and The Future is Bright is finalized.
I was talking about The Future is Bright here. Couldn’t put my finger on what I should I call it so I called it the new lighting system. Why wouldn’t you just add it for both of them then? As I see it, Roblox will eventually have custom normal maps, why not have one for the current system? It could be another year until The Future is Bright becomes available, right?
The old lighting is already on the way out – it won’t have any new features developed for it. Not a valuable allocation for work that is soon to be trashed (a year isn’t that long in a business environment). Normal maps will have to wait for The Future is Bright.
Maybe I interpreted it wrong, but that post made it seem like implementing new features (e.g. normal maps) for old lighting is done because they’d have to be designed and implemented twice otherwise.
I’d honestly love to see this implemented at some point - especially since Roblox is moving away from primarily being a brick-building game to a more professional game development platform / engine.
