Flow Maps for scrolling textures

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard, or nearly impossible to create realistic environments with water, or water-like materials without using multiple beams (which can eat up resources quickly since each beam is a separate drawcall.)

With flow maps, you would be able to assign a custom flow map texture per part (to allow for multiple flow maps on the same material or texture), and level artists would be able to have water waves flow around rocks and flow with a river’s edges instead of through it.

This would also allow for say, lava in a volcano scenario to flow through cracks realistically.

Here’s two good videos on what flow maps are:

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Its sad roblox doesn’t add decade-old features to their game

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Roblox won’t add this, as this involves updating their terrain system, which they are very scared of doing.

This is sarcastic, for the people that don’t understand humor.

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@enzogamer123vv @RocketSlither

Instead of useless complaining that only serves to clutter the replies, perhaps you could provide some use cases for this so that Roblox can better understand the impact that adding this would have. I’ll even provide an example of how to constructively contribute to feature requests:


As someone who works on both roleplay games and fighting games, we’d be able to make some pretty cool visuals out of flow maps.

  • For roleplay games, everything stated in the original OP applies. I’d like to add onto it and say that for fantasy games, flow maps could be used for wavy magic effects or “melting”.
  • For fighting games, applying a flowmap to parts would heavily improve our VFX. VFX could flow around characters and the map could shift and buckle when hit.

You can do some really weird and cool things with them and I’d love to see flow maps implemented as another tool in our belt as devs
flowmap gif

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I was joking. I was saying that because Roblox never updates their terrain system.

I would love and hope to see this in game. As it would make many things look better.

There was actually some work being done recently to improve the flexibility of the Terrain’s pixel grid:

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FINALLY THEY ARE UPDATING TERRAIN.

Even though it’s nothing people are asking for…

That tweet mentions it’s a new voxelizer for terrain… which does sound like it might be laying the groundwork for features people have been asking for…

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