[Full Release] Enabling GrassLength

that was old me tbf, it’s just a common occurrence i’d like to point out

never thought i’d be roasted by a staff member (i’m such a lucky guy)
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Has performance been increased?
I remember big (multiple second) freezes when changing the slider for a large map. Making actual sliding of the slider impossible.

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It’d be cool to see a unique feature where the grass in some form interacts with the player.

Like brushing round and moving around the player in patches etc.

But neat update!

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WOOOOOOOOOO

No wonder my lighting report got closed y’all were COOKING or should I say BAKING

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YESSSSS, I WAS WAITING FOR THISSS FOR SOO LONGG!! :relieved:

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The GIF is strangely beautiful…

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Great feature, for Cut The Grass RP we would love it to have Grass Patch independency and Coloration capability per patch so we can modulate the look to match certain types of grass we cut or have players interact with. Keep up the good work cant wait to see more team!

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That’s exciting. I’m awaiting custom grass textures :slight_smile:

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Re: Scriptability ( + @parker02311, @SelDraken, @MightyDantheman, @ROWG_Leader)

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.

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Hey, great job!

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.

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Re: Custom Grass / Decorators (+ @ahmedsa321, @Lockefair)

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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

75d4aecafb42e17a07ba50a22ec403d5

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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.

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Thanks for the update! Glad you’re at least looking into it.

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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.

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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.

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Gee whiz. Holy Mackerel, even!

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Make it scriptable to some extent and we’ll be ALL GOOD