Personally, as a classic builder, I don’t like this change. It’s now harder to obtain all studded parts or general studded parts. I don’t like that I have to either write a plugin or wait until someone makes a plugin for it. I get that ROBLOX wants to move away from surfaces, but it’s ruining some parts of the community.
12 Likes
I understand your desire–when we were making this call, we looked at our analytics and saw that there were a few people making stud games but not enough to warrant keeping the feature. A texture will be the most future-proof solution, but since the surface API still does exist, it is possible to write a plugin to do so. If the usage was high enough or this feature important enough to warrant a 1st-party plugin, we would have left it as-is, but it wasn’t.
10 Likes
I know changes like this can be frustrating, but since the API is still available, your projects’ current behavior won’t change and it is possible to rebuild the tool’s functionality. Or as others have pointed out, perhaps textures are an option, too.
11 Likes
Good catch. Yes, we will change that, too (goal will be to preserve backwards compatibility; looking into it with eng now). Ironically most of the usage of the Surfaces tool has been to switch parts to be smooth.
11 Likes
This is a solid change. After SOI (Surface Orientation Indicator) was announced/released, surfaces lacked relevancy and became somewhat redundant to the better methods that now exist. Writing a plugin to restore the same functionality is somewhat easy so, there’s really not much downsides to this not being here.
1 Like
FWIW, I do not think this is a good idea. This will break games that expect otherwise.
4 Likes
We are discussing this now. Preserving backwards compatibility is important. At the same time, it seems a bit wonky (to me anyway) if Instance.new spawns a part in a way that you have to use a deprecated API to make it smooth.
12 Likes
Very much hoping this doesn’t affect existing content using studs/inlets/glue visually, could be devastating if it does.
6 Likes
Idk it will be pointless for roblox to remove them since people can use textures to do it again
1 Like
It wouldn’t be hard to build right, as without hotkeys its alot harder and time taking thing to build anything in studio?
1 Like
It is actually possible to bind hotkeys to plugin actions, they just can’t have default bindings, so most plugin authors don’t bother creating hotkey assignable actions for their plugins.
1 Like
Technically yes, you are correct. But I don’t want over 6k parts with textures in them, that’s just very messy and impratical.
6 Likes
Ah, yes, okay. So I have to Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V a texture of studs or whatever other surface I need onto every single part in my game now. That’s wonderful.
4 Likes
As the surface tool is now deprecated, changing surfaces would be slightly more tedious. Here’s a list of how to still use surfaces without the tool.
Use a texture
Upload your own texture
Find a surfaced part/wedge/cornerwedge in the toolbox
Edit surfaces using a script
Change the surface properties of a part (only works if it already has at least 1 surface)
Create a plugin that works exactly like the Surface Tool.
Wait for someone to create said plugin above
(As I do not know how to make plugins, I would be delighted if there are any current Surface Tool plugins right now. I would also love to know if there is a surface tool plugin in the future 
)
Go through all your projects to find parts with surfaces, and upload them to Roblox yourself to get your own Surface Part kit!
That’s all the methods I could find, hope this helps any of you Stud Fans!
3 Likes
yeah but:
- having an unholy amount of textures on every surface is generally very inefficient and messy
- Textures dont let you have normal maps that most surface type make use of, so
having every single studded surface looking like your graphics level is set to 1 when its actually at max is really painful to look at (and as a JToH player, it would be extremely painful), and you cant use SurfaceAppearances because that would require that every part be a MeshPart.
12 Likes
Yeah, I see why I would not want to use textures as an alternative.
Not only must you find a texture for every type of surface you need, you have to find one of a certain quality.
Oh and also I see you are also a jtoh player, cool. Not to mention the discord server had a stroke upon realizing the deprecation of surface tools
3 Likes
For those people that use surfaces, here is a easily accessible kit I uploaded for all your uses.
4 Likes
What exactly is the intended replacement for surfaces? I’ve been using third-party ‘weld scripts’ for years, since surfaces became quite offset-heavy and placing weld constraints on each and every piece of a model is incredibly tedious to set up. Studs received that odd new automatic ‘snap’ behavior, but if studs themselves are being deprecated then that feature will also most likely be deprecated. Thus, what is Roblox’s ‘official’ intended way of connecting parts together in this day and age?
1 Like
There are several options.
Adding WeldConstraints via the Constraints section of the Model tab is quick and easy. You can click Weld from the Create drop-down and then click two parts to weld the together.
You can select a group of parts, and when you click “Weld” all touching parts will have a weld created between them.
Additionally, we have the “Join Surfaces” option in the “Tools” section. When this is enabled, flat surfaces of parts will join together while building just like they did with Studs, but the SurfaceType does not matter.
10 Likes