As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to protect your decals and meshes from other people using them.
If Roblox is able to address your issue, how would it improve your game and/or your development experience? - It would only allow me to be the user of the things I created, which is exactly how it should be. I don’t want people to just take my meshes and decals and use them in their own games. I just encountered a person using my decals and saying how they’re great and all as if he made them, once I confronted him about it he told me that he stole it from someone else who is also a big developer of the same genre of games, this means that my decals are in circulation between developers and I’m not even being credited for it. If other, just as big or bigger developers use my decals or meshes without credit, my game can lose players as they might not want to play it since they assume I stole the content, not the other way around. This is a big problem and it would be really great if it was addressed.
Edit:
Saying “just upload on an alt” is not a fix as an exploiter could still easily get the decals and leak them to everyone.
If we’re considering exploiters then the whole point is moot because anyone can just steal the files from memory.
Normally when this is brought up people say they’d rather have some protection than no protection, which is just as bad of an argument because anyone who cares is going to get the assets no matter what you do.
The only result of these types of asset protection features is making is harder to be a legitimate developer and work as a team. e.g., just recently there was a period of time where our artists couldn’t export meshes because they didn’t upload them.
If exploiters had to go to the lengths of pulling the texture from memory, most of them just wouldn’t bother. And the textures can still be stolen even on an alt since anyone can stumble upon it or dig and find it if they really wanted to.
If they’re going to all the trouble to make a game that uses your content, don’t think spending an extra 5 minutes downloading a ripper is going to stop them.
Best case scenario: people just copy your content instead of directly ripping it. And we’ll still have people asking roblox for some kind of protection against this.
People are not stealing my content to hurt my game, they just do it because they’re not good at making content just like that. Honestly, people can also rip animations from games, but as far as I know no one can do it since no such ripper exists. If people aren’t going to bother ripping animations I don’t think that a lot of people would be ripping meshes and decals. Having protection on meshes and decals would also make the place stealing process harder for the exploiter as the meshes and decals would not work in the game since they’re not the owner so they’d have to manually upload and replace each one.
You can just download animations from the website. No ripper required.
This is how it should be btw. I download files from the site on a daily basis. You have to when you’re working with multiple groups and teams - there’s just no room for a concept of asset ownership. Something in this space was actually recently changed for a while and our artists couldn’t export meshes because they didn’t own them. It was awful.
I’m pretty sure animation downloading has been patched, I don’t know though as I don’t do it. There is room for asset ownership if it is done properly, e.g. if you could choose who to share with, etc.
No, I can definitely download your animations right now.
Choosing who to share with is a bad idea. Every time I hire someone I have to add them to the whitelist for each of the thousands of assets the entire studio uses? And every time anyone makes an asset they have to update it with everyone in the studio?
Therefore, you could group up animations and then change the whitelist on that group to the people you want, or there could be some other method to make it easier for groups of people. No problem is without solution, but some problems take a lot of work, so it’s up to Roblox if they want to pursue this. It would really help out people like me who don’t want their assets easily stolen. This whole whitelist thing could easily be optional so if you don’t care about people taking your assets you could just allow anyone to use it.