In the future, our intention is to offer a more flexible solution which will allow per-area grass length, density and color instead of global properties This future solution will be based off our Read/WriteVoxelChannel API and it will allow writing grass information to voxels similar to writing water. This approach will be scriptable.
As a note, we are not able to share a timeline for this next step at this time, and we currently have higher priorities we are working on, but this project is ranking high in our list of features to develop.
Can you guys also add diffrence in terrain colors and grass length.
what i mean when i need to color a water green because of a terrain all the water changes it will be good if you guys add that option when making the water instead of in the terrain instance, same with the grass length, and more terrain freedom of options to maximize our creativity.
This is a very requested feature we’re tracking. We are keeping it in mind when making our future plans, but it is going to be a step further in the roadmap than local grass length, density and color due to its complexity. We can’t share concrete plans regarding custom grass and decorators at this time, but it is tracked and accounted for.
Is higher general performance and visuals for foliage objects a thing have you guys accounted for though? Often times whatever foliage we can make can end up looking glitchy (depth’s changing depending on camera angles, things just having incorrect depths). Along with performance just in general being pretty poor when it comes to anything foliage.
Or are the new upcoming things primarily designed just for the voxel terrain?
It is extremely cool that GrassLength is now available in production. However, Roblox grass is only great for stylized scenes. I am looking forward to the release of some features like being able to change the material and mesh of the grass.
Will a future Terrain system include custom vegetation? A custom LOD system for billboards etc?
Can it be expanded beyond just “local grass” and into a fully fledged vegetation system. Voxel terrain is pretty great but including a better plant system would start to compete with Unreal godot etc for detailed and openworlds.
I think the prospect of this update is super cool however, in real-time application it seems it’s less to do with the length of the grass and more with the volume of grass generated. When you change the grass length, it appears to just generate larger scale grass in the same area, rather than actually increasing the length of the grass.
(Example, in the video)
I think this may be potentially solved with the addition of grass density, to create the look of actually tall grass but, as you guys are trying to cook something up, I guess we’ll just have to be patient. It is clear that you guys are aware of the limitations of Roblox terrain, I just hope I can get some fancy realistic grass and foliage soon lol.
We shouldn’t be seeing multiple second freezes when changing GrassLength. If you are still experiencing this issue, please let us know and we’ll file a bug for it.
We are keeping performance in mind for our current and future work, but we don’t have concrete plans to announce regarding custom decorators / foliage system at this time.
Right now, the Engine does have constraints when dealing with depth ordering of transparent objects and textures, which are quite complex to solve. Additionally, since a common way of creating foliage involves using transparent textures, there’s also a inherent performance cost because transparent objects are more expensive to render.
We are aware of those issues and are tracking them, but we are currently working on higher priorities at this time.
I’m excited for when this new terrain system will come out. I do agree a full on vegitation system is a great idea. This would allow infinite terrain generation for games to be a possibilty without needing the dev to create whole vegitation systems.
GrassLength is a non-scriptable property because it is incompatible with the future Terrain system we are building, which will provide more grass flexibility.
Does this mean that when this future terrain comes out, we’ll be able to do stuff like mowing grass? That would be a great feature for roleplay and immersion!
Hi there @LightBeamRays I’m not sure if this is the right place to post this, it appears that the wind animation for the grass is bugged and no longer seems to work which is a shame since I like to max out the grass length in my places for this as it looks pretty nice. Can this be sanity checked before I file an official bug report? wondering if it’s my end or if it’s actually broken now. I also noticed my other place with this doesn’t animate anymore either.
Apologies in advance if this fails to fall under this discussion.
Today, we are moving GrassLength out of Beta and it is now Fully Released! We are thankful for all the great feedback you sent us and we are tracking your requests around getting more customizability of decorators and Terrain in general. If you experience any issues with GrassLength, please let us know by submitting a bug report.
We already to this but we have to remove the grass lol. Cut The Grass RP - Roblox, ( shameless plug ) however I fully agree that Variation in how high we can cut would be amazing, especially if we could get a specific density to it. WE would also love grass patches with variation to do crops, but hey we can wait
