Even the experience that was in the Metaverse Champions event had 1 stud building.
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Personally, although the tool itself was limited to a few surfaces, the ability to easily click + drag textures would’ve made for a large tool improvement on applying any surface/user uploaded texture in the surface tool’s style.
Unless I’m missing out on any plugins that do the exact same thing as this tool, this fan-made plugin was the only one that tried to replicate the surface tool’s original function through its API, and it was created only after this was announced. So this could’ve been an opportunity to expand upon the tool more rather than tediously [CTRL] + [C]/[CTRL] + [V] a handful textures and surfaces onto your parts, or have a model containing pre-textured bricks when you could possibly want a specific side of the texture removed from them.
I’m sure this was a great change for many people out there. To me however, I honestly saw it as a missed opportunity that could’ve helped many of us beforehand.
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Personally, I do not support this change.
I’ve been around here for nearly a decade at this point and got into studio very quickly as a youngster. At some point in my ROBLOX career I became very involved and fascinated with architecture that relied on the usage of classic surfaces and building techniques.
Look, I get it. ROBLOX is an ever-evolving platform which aims to provide its developers with the best tools it can offer for game development and the inclusion of legacy features such as the surface tool may confuse newer creators. This is not a problem though, I feel like you should simply be able to mark surface types as a legacy feature, and let those who read the API decide upon whether they want to use them or not.
There’s no harm in a surface tool still existing to detail parts as you will find that there are a lot more communities that you’d like to think which rely on these surfaces for texturing their builds. I don’t want to wait around for a plugin to be created which replaces the surface picker functionality, nor do I necessarily want to code one myself. What is the harm in a tool that doesn’t actually do anything beyond giving a certain aesthetic to a part surface these days?
Getting rid of features which the community still use doesn’t make sense. I could understand your viewpoint if the feature was something huge and overbearing, but it’s literally just a baked in “plugin” to the toolbar on studio which a generous amount of us use in our building styles.
Look at some of the high player count games these days such as Pilfering Pirates, Doomspire Brickbattle, etc… that still rely on building styles like this. I don’t think it needed to be removed completely.
That’s my two cents though.
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This change is suppose to help developers. It seems its doing the opposite. Sure every game on the front page doesn’t use any surfaces. But there are some games that use them. Like difficulty charts. Right now I’m trying to make one but that feels totally impossible now.
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Don’t worry, it isn’t impossible. If you scroll up you can find the community resource for a Surface Tool plugin. The controls are slightly different, but it works well.
yeah. Im just talking overall excluding plugins(lol).
“Continuing this evolution away from Surfaces” - We all know this means it’s going to be removed sometime.
What about the massive amount of no longer developed games that use studs to connect parts?
Every single game that use studs to keep models together will all literally break apart with this update.
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While I can’t comment on future decisions and you should not take this as commitment one way or another, please remember that while we deprecate things to keep advancing the platform, we do not commonly remove the functionality. We provide a significant amount of backwards compatibility.
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Sorry, I am not really up-to-date with the surfaces being deprecated
@JoshSedai, I have a question. If the Motor surface is still in there, how would I add it into a part? I need this for a camera part. Is there any POSSIBLE remaining way to get to work with it?
I did actually saw that if I import an e.g. Part with a Motor surface, it actually shows the surfaces data in the properties tab. This is something…
I believe you can set the enum in code still. I haven’t tried the plugin listed above to see what it does/doesn’t support. SurfaceType
Please also see the prior posts about removing surface types:
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So, you mean, I could change the surface type with Enum in the command bar? That would be helpful…
This didn’t seem like the update to really evolve roblox, but considering you didn’t listen to the feedback on the new material textures at first you probably don’t care about a minority of developers! thanks roblox! 
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I just spent the last thirty minutes looking for the surface tool, while thinking I was going crazy.
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