Hi everyone!
Currently, I am very pleased to observe in which direction the Roblox is moving. All these updates cannot but please me!
But I, as well as my developer friends, often encounter the problem of creating the visual part of their games. Today I want to talk about what needs to be changed or added
- Foliage & Terrain System
- Volumetric Lightning
- Procedural Shaders
- Vfx graphs & better particle system
- More Texture maps & Tileable surface appearance
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Shader System
Shader system
Roblox studio is a great game engine for people like me, people who likes to keep it simple, but sometimes I feel like Roblox studio is missing some things. I checked out RDC 2021 and looked at the new features that are being planned, great stuff! But for me (And for other people as well), I have been using blender for almost 2 years now, Blender comes with there own material graph. 
this material graph provides a procedural texturing system, what I mean by this is that u can change how your texture functions in real time. But that isn’t the main argument to why I would want Roblox to add a Node Based Material/Shader system.
We developers here on Roblox are currently very limited in our tools, if they would add a node based material system however we Developers here on Roblox would be able to create stuff like toon shaders:
Procedural Water shaders on meshes like we see in most games!:
Wind shader for our trees!
I think most developers who are reading this understands now why this feature would be critical for Roblox to add, imagine what beautiful scenes we developers here on Roblox would be able to create!
Terrain and Foliage System
Terrain and Foliage System
In Roblox Studio, we developers have a tool called Terrain editor, This allows us developers to create terrain inside of Roblox. Although this tool is great for creating massive worlds. The limitations is its downfall. We only get to choose between 22 textures that every game can use.
You can not create a custom terrain system and have as many textures as you want to. This makes most developers skip terrain and instead work with just a flat ground. Like we have in most simulators.
With these feature we developers would also need a vertex blend system, so we can blend our textures together in a seamless way!
Roblox terrain system also comes with a decoration property. Once this property is enabled, grass pops up on the locations where you have painted grass on your terrain. This grass system is efficient and optimized well! But, as i mentioned earlier, this is not enough. What us developer really would need is a custom foliage system. If you ever have used other game engines such as Unreal Engine, you would probably know that they have a tool called “Foliage Tool”. This tool allows developers using Unreal Engine to paint on their own custom foliage! The foliage tool is also well optimized so even if you paint it on the whole world, it wont lag!
If we developers would have a shading system as well as a Foliage system, we would be able to combine these two to create stuff like wind shaders for our foliage in the game! Wouldn’t that be awesome!
Volumetric lighting
Volumetric lighting
Volumetric lighting , also known as “God rays”, is a technique used in 3D computer graphics to add lighting effects to a rendered scene.
Currently, in Roblox. We developers have to cheat when making volumetric lightning for us to have a more atmospheric way of decorating our scenes
What we currently do is that we make a texture which has the appearance of volumetric lightning, Then we use it on a beam to make it look like we have volumetric lighting in our games.
As you may see, this does not look nearly as good as real volumetric lightning does, And you can not step inside beams either, so it only looks okay from a distance.
Roblox need to add this for us developer to be able to spice up our scenes and make the overall Roblox experience much more atmospheric!
Vfx graphs & better particle system
Vfx Graphs
One thing i truly miss on Roblox is a proper vfx graph. Vfx graphs is a system that allows developers to create awesome visual effects for our games. Since it is named Vfx graph, the workflow is basically the same as blenders material system, except it is mainly focused on visual effects!
This would be truly helpful for us Developers here on Roblox to create visually appealing effects while at the same time have a consistent workflow! This would be awesome on Anime games (Abilities). If you wanted to make maybe a health pack pickup, you could add some visual effects to make the player really get that it is something consumable!
Better particle system
Roblox particle system right now is basically just animated images. We have no collision property whatsoever. What we would need for particle system right now on Roblox is probably a 3D particle emitter and a collision property! Also some kind of timeline so that you can position your particles to emit at the same time!
More Texture maps & Tileable surface appearance
More Texture maps
Roblox needs to add the rest of the texture maps you can use when it comes to texturing, Such as emission textures and heightmaps.
Tileable Surface appearance
We need a property to tile our Surface appearance so that when we scale our meshes, the texture tile along with the mesh instead of getting stretched, that’s it.
Do you want these changes in the future?
- Yes
- No
0 voters
Roblox is one of the largest gaming companies in the industry right now. If they would like to spend their money on the most important stuff on Roblox studio right now, they would be able to.
An argument against this:
“its just not an easy thing for them to add because Roblox doesn’t even support HLSL coding”
It may not be easy for them to add. But if Roblox where to put their resources on fixing this, they would actually be able to!
That’s why I am begging Roblox right here and right now to add systems like this, systems for us developers to expand our creativity! 
Please like this post and spread it to other developers here on Roblox so that we together can make a change!
Thanks for reading.