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.
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
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…