As a Roblox developer, it is currently hard to produce the high-quality terrain we want in our games due to the lack of some essential features in Studio. Therefore, I would like to request some extra features I believe we need in Studio.
Specifically, I want to suggest some features related to the Terrain System, and how Materials look at the Terrain system. The current Terrain system is good, but I think there are some features missing that would allow us to create better-looking games. Here a few summarized features I want to bring into Studio:
TerrainDetail, Color: The Color property changes the color of the TerrainDetail
TerrainDetail, Scale: The Scale property changes how big the overlay of TerrainDetail is on the MaterialVariant, the bigger the value is, the more it takes over the MaterialVariant
TerrainDetail, Angle: The Angle feature allows us to change the Angle of the TerrainDetail and decides on which angle its gonna become visible at
Smoother/More Vertices on the Terrain âMeshâ: We need a smoother terrain with more vertices to allow us to create high-quality terrain easily without blockyness
TerrainDetail, Top-Side: Another terrain layer to the TerrainDetail, example shown here (Fortnite):
Terrain, Paint Color And Opacity: The ability to color and draw spots of other terrains in low Opacity on the Terrain would help us create biomes and more life-like terrain, as seen at this example from Fortnite agian:
Terrain Paint Size to 0.1 and Custom Paint Brush: We need a more precise paint brush and the ability to create a custom paint brush with different brushes or own texture imported to create it
Terrain, Custom material transition trough the png alpha
Custom Deceration (Grass): Custom Grass with either Mesh or PNG that replaces the default Roblox Grass (Terrain.Deceration)
The abillity to add custom terrain materials and not override existing ones
If Roblox could add these features, it would improve my and others development experience by allowing us to create better-looking games with more detailed and life-like terrain
I could not agree more. While having more general detail on the Terrain might be intensive (so it shouldnât be an immediate change.), the fact we canât color terrain with a Color Brush or something is a real limiting factor especially in 2023.
All of these are good ideas. Additionally it would be nice to be able to use more/less voxels in specific areas. Iâm working on a large-scale war game and I want the map to be massive for people who are flying aircraft overhead. Right now I canât really do that unless I waste millions of voxels on extending the terrain in all directions. Being able to adjust voxel resolution in certain areas would allow developers to add even more detail to their playable area while reducing the memory/computation cost of far-away areas. We would be able to have even bigger terrains at even less cost.
Iâd like to color the grass material separate colors.
For this, I donât think Roblox should have a #2 thing. Rather I feel we should have a slider for more âintenseâ blending. (no blending materials â crazy fade/blending of materials)
Here a responses from staff related to some of the things in this feature request:
It was a response to the many things, some that are in this feature request such as the painting stuff. I previously was going to quote everything people were asking for, but notifying that many people probably wasnât a good idea. (quotes)
Itâs probably not a position/job in of itself, but I wonder how many people at Roblox are working on the Terrain system.
Iâd be here all day if I tried to pull legit everything out of that announcement thread let alone the entire forum, and off it. Some have similar or the same idea, but thereâs quite a variety of things people would like. It all is certainly a massive undertaking if youâre working on the Terrain system at Roblox. A lot of âgroundâ to cover.
I simply cannot believe that this isnât a possibility in Roblox yet. They should be putting all their resources towards making this a reality. How is anyone gonna take games seriously like they want if this isnât an option
Bump.
I definitely agree that we should have some of these features with voxel terrain. If they do look upon improving them, this is what my Idea would be.
The terrainâs voxel resolution should be slightly higher (This is not going to be too resource intensive, as devices have evolved significantly).
It should be toggleable through experience options. Some of the experiences that target a timeline from 2015 to 2020 would opt out, while modern experiences that focus on more detail would opt in.
The concept is to improve the level of detail. For example, when a playerâs viewport is closer to the terrain, it is to be rendered in a higher subdivision, while being farther decreases the subdivision.
Subdivision should be varied upon the userâs graphics quality. This is to make sure that games are playable on lower end devices.
Terrain Masks: A feature like this would be useful if the developer wants to change the color of a terrain region or modify the resolution.
As a part of terrain masks, the ability to customize the length of grass. In some areas, the grass would be short, while in more densely vegetated areas, it would be longer.
I might see part of this being added in the future, as the behavior of water terrain has been improved already.
Bumping this.
No matter how much effort I put into making the terrain look natural, it always ends up looking a bit off or awkward. Adding these features would go a long way toward making terrain feel more realistic and visually appealing. Definitely something we need.
The new makeup feature actually provides some incredibly useful features as a nice bonus for anyone not directly interested in makeup itself (PBR for Textures/Decals and the ability to project a Decal onto a mesh), itâs just that âmakeupâ is more marketable and easier to understand for the average player so thatâs how the feature was pushed.
Iâm not a big fan of Robloxâs terrain in general. Itâs at least 10 years old without any noticeable improvement other than the grass decorations. And even that is hit or miss.
I wish there was an easier way to allow for better looking, more optimized terrain. I would be fine with the terrain system if it didnât lean entirely on a primitive 3/4-stage LOD system and used sinking and/or greedy meshing. Itâd come at the cost of losing destruction, but who cares about cool physics at this point.
