Will the surface tool be removed completely at some point? If it has no real purpose anymore so I would just prefer removing it completely to make room for new tools that might be added in the future.
Someday, but some people want to still apply those surfaces for visual aesthetic. So it won’t be removed until there is a better alternative.
I think the best way to do this is using the lovely collection of part adornments that studio provides.
Wow, an arrow! And it only took a cone and a cylinder adornment. People should be using this instead if they desperately need to mark the direction of their parts (if there is nothing else marking the direction already for some reason), rather than trying to use a legacy feature that has had no real purpose for years.
There are no plans to ever cause existing VehicleSeat cars with hinge surface Rotate joints to break, this would be too disruptive to existing games.
Otherwise the future of the VehicleSeat is unknown, it’s functionally deprecated, and has no plans to be updated or improved in any way.
This is cool! Hinges have always been annoying. Glad that this is fixed.
Yes that’s also a good alternative! I’ll add it to the list of alternatives in the main post
VehicleSeats themselves still serve a valuable purpose for scripted vehicles actually. They provide the perfect interface for that type of code because they handle all of the movement and camera stuff for you (I think they’re actually entirely handled in controller modules iirc so there’s virtually no non-lua code in that situation which is what I think is what Roblox is aiming for. (We are seeing everything being ported to lua, the stepping stone originally being controller code which is now leading to, Humanoids as we saw in the AvatarEvolution build, the draggers, etc)
I love the idea that we will be able to modify, and at least see every little piece of code in the engine. I am going to guess Roblox intends (or at least will eventually end up intending) to write a lot of content on the devhub for custom vehicles and such in the future (there’s already quite a bit on there, such as the “car kit”).
This fits with everything that I think Roblox aims to be, and, I look forward to firstly the awesome performance, the awesome lighting, and the awesome modeling features, but, I also look forward to the content Roblox will produce in light of all of this.
I need to create unions with a certain orientation. Back then when SurfaceTypes was a thing (a couple hours ago) I could just go to the properties of the part and click a surface to see that yellow selection in its corresponding face in the union hitbox. But now I can’t 
Do I really have to use decals, textures or surfaceguis now? That sounds so unprofessional…
Edit: it is still possible if we use the Model > Parts > Surface option to change any smooth surface. I hope they don’t remove this option anytime soon! (Imo we don’t need “a better alternative” for this, but we’ll see. Roblox is making amazing updates lately!)
I’ve been using Hinges for quite some time now and moved on from that into the alternative way which is much easier to control and customize, but seeing that some tools that I usually use to benefit my workflow being deprecated will be sad to see go away from Roblox as I usually use hinges/motors to detect a part side or to make spinning parts function as they should.
(sad 3D Noises) 
A question that I have is that will most of the Developer Hub articles be updated and changed since Hinges/Motors are being removed as some tutorials use them? It might be obvious but I just wanted to know.
I really do prefer some sort of setting where it can show an arrow on all sides and maybe when you hover over it, it can tell you what side you’re moving like FrontSurface or LeftSurface as it would benefit most developers a lot.
Side note on what I said above: Hinges/Motors were something useful for developers now and mostly in 2013-2016 when they had to remember or use those two components from a couple of minutes ago to decide what side is this on for some sort of model; not all of us agree that it was not a reliable solution as it’s so much easier to do so that part I kind of disagree with a bit.
Anyway, I like to see these changes that are coming to September 7th a bit more later or early if I have a certain situation but a concern that I have with removing the surface tool/section is that it will be a bit harder to change and customize part surfaces nowadays as I have to be careful when selecting multiple parts or even a whole model to change the surface that I need, such as Universal, Smooth or Hinge.
^ Only if there was a replacement in the future which I hope. 
Anyway, sad moments into Roblox studio but changes have to be made.
As stated in the original post, they are aware of this use case. However, using SurfaceTypes was not a “professional” solution at all. At the time being, you can alternatively use attachments, adornments, images, or the view selector.
The view selector doesn’t work in local space though 
so it can’t be used to determine which face of a part is, for example, its front surface.
But as stated on another post, the “Surface” option is still fully available, so we can still use it!
Also I’ll miss hinges btw
A tutorial for this new feature might be extremely helpful for new developers like me. Something on the DevHub or here, at the #resources:community-tutorials category.
Aww man I used those
I admit, the new hinge constraints are are a lot better than old ones, but what if we wan’t some visual hinges? Will that be added to hinge constraints?
EDIT: nvm found a solution
Cool and all, But now there’s no clear way to tell a parts face without putting something like a decal on it.
Some times I really need to know what face is the front, right and top ,but now this is now very difficult to do.
Maybe an option in properties to show some lines sticking out of it to show what face is which
made a plugin to solve this problem lol go check it out or something
People concerned about losing the ability to see which face is the front face of a part should create a feature request to add this functionality in another way, since this was always unintended usage of this feature in the first place!
E.g. making the draggers show face labels next to the grab handles when in local mode.
I dont really see this as something i would enjoy being removed, as most of the things being removed i will miss, like when tix and bc was removed, and does this mean once they are removed everything that uses this will fall apart, or would it take another publish for it fully to break?
Ehh… I do see the need to kill the support for this, but I feel like the proper tools should’ve been added before they were removed from developers. I find all of these alternatives to finding a part’s surface to be kind of a bummer, as it used to be only a click of a button to see any surface…
Best alternative I found was to add a decal / texture to a part to temporarily see which face you are trying to find. Wish support was added for this elsewhere before it was removed
edit: whoops, saw this already mentioned in alternative options… but point still stands
I am not particularly happy with this change for lack of proper alternatives for the visual reliance and the added speed bump of needing to develop a plugin to accomplish this.
Highlighting part surfaces was instrumental to quickly finding a surface. What once took less than a second by simply clicking on one of the surface properties (not even changing it) will now take many many times longer as I have to create an instance or edit a property, then remember to undo that change later down the line.
While developing a plugin is undeniably the best way to go (that’s their very purpose, after all), it would be nice if this behavior was implemented into the Lua draggers before this change was made. Even something as simple as color differences on movement handles would work for this (e.g. 255 for r/g/b on positive axes, 127 for r/g/b on negative axes, so +x is [255, 0, 0] and -x is [127, 0, 0]).
Couldn’t have said it better! This change is a huge slowdown on figuring out which way a parts surface is facing. Putting decals or adornments on parts is extremely inconvenient and isn’t an efficient or reliable way of displaying the parts surfaces.
There really needs to be a easy and quick solution like a button which displays the name of the parts surface.
