This is great! A bit overdue but great to finally have.
This is now in addition to the reply from @focasds, because I also have concerns lol
Is there a timeframe in mind when this is going to its next phase? If this is a non-scriptable property, I can’t imagine how useful it’ll be to experiences with multiple types of scenery until the quote mentioned takes place.
Setting up your experience’s map for a global grass height— just to wait for a change that’ll force us to remake the map to be visually pleasing with varying grass heights seems counterintuitive. If it’s not impactful to performance at all grass heights, why not make the property scriptable? And give access to ReadVoxels on grass height within that region?
(Sorry if that’s a bit confusing. I have issues getting my thoughts on paper sometimes haha)
i’ve been playing with it for a few minutes, so far it looks promising.
however, when i change lenght from -0.1 to 1.0, the grass seems to increase size by only 2x, this seems odd.
my suggestions:
-rename “Lenght” to “Size”
-add real “Lenght” ^^
-add “Density” (for very short, but many leaves - like moss)
-make each voxel adjustable for grass lenght(+size etc) and wind direction/speed
This update is very good but something that I think everbody wants is regional based settings where you can adjust the color and now the length of the grass in certain areas
Man look, i don’t want to crap on anyone who worked on this but this update is just pretty… “mid”. Can i get some sort of explanation as to why something as simple as grass height had to get an entire RDC section only to STILL not even let us use it the same way it was used in that RDC section? Why wasn’t this sort of feature implemented by default when this sort of grass was first introduced? I 100% doubt it was some crazy internal technical limitation considering that i DOUBT any sort of programmer working on a grass shader will simply ignore the idea of having a grass length slider. Is this really the level of innovation were working with here?
Also, why can’t we edit the grass height at runtime? What was the idea behind this? Why lock it behind a studio locked property? I really cannot buy the idea that its simply a non-scriptable property just because it will get removed in god knows how many months/years. We might as well have everything we can get before that actual “removal” will happen but i guess not. I really do not get why almost every time were being given an update, said update MUST ALWAYS have some sort of weird and unreasonable limitation/limitations behind it.
This is a beta release. Their goal is to get these updates into our hands as early as possible. This means before the full update is completed. Keep in mind that shaders aren’t universal like Lua is for us. It’s more complicated than it would seem on the surface, especially when everything is put together. While I agree that these updates seem to take much longer than they should, there’s also a lot of things going on behind the scenes that aren’t made public.
They even specifically mentioned at RDC that just because something wasn’t mentioned doesn’t mean it isn’t being worked on, and further said that there’s generally a good reason as to why it wasn’t mentioned yet. To this extent, I have to disagree with Roblox. I think this is the main issue with their transparency. I feel as though all of their updates, and their progress, should be displayed to developers.
But the point I was getting at is that all of this will be fixed up in the future.
While i understand that they’re trying to get updates asap, what i cannot understand (or even find any justification for) is how some very simple and basic features need this much time and multiple releases for them to only be implemented in such a way that they’re STILL limited one way or another. I personally do think whatever new grass system they are thinking about will be more sophisticated than whatever we have now, i still cannot find any sort of justification as to why not just offer whatever they already got by default considering that what they do have are some beyond simple changes that there’s also have barely any justification of reasoning as to why they weren’t there by default.
As for shaders, while indeed they aren’t exactly as universal as Lua/Luau, theres still standards that should work on all platforms regardless. I doubt ROBLOX would magically be using some other random system for their shaders that only works on a single specific platform. It’s hard to believe that the grass shader itself wasn’t built on a universal standard.
Also isn’t this the same kind of thing AAA game studios (even other studios) do to justify releasing an unfinished product? Releasing X game/product now and just patch it up later? Maybe you could give roblox more justification on this just because this isn’t really a beta release of an entire product but its still not helping that we have to wait months to even years for them to “fix” the fact that we cant even change a grass length slider at runtime.
For this particular case, I remember that they have a whole dream of an elaborate terrain decoration system that will let developers define decorators for terrain surfaces themselves. This is a single nonscriptable property because they don’t want developers to integrate it deeply into their games and make further backwards-compatible changes in this area impossible, or game-breaking.
I completely understand your frustration. For this, I blame Roblox not explaining exactly why these features take so long.
As far as the grass system they showed off, that was a custom build of Studio that was meant specifically for that. When putting things into the full Studio, there’s more that they have to do. It’s even more important that they get things right for any updates that work in live Studio, as any bugs can cause potentially severe damage to existing projects.
Part of the reason it’s taking longer with shaders is that they appear to be working on their rendering pipeline in general:
Here are some other things they’re working on that are related to that *(some aren’t related, but I just took a screenshot of everything):
This is completely different to releasing a game. A game costs money, and if the game isn’t working properly, that’s effectively a scam. Here, Roblox is releasing an update early for developers to try out. This is a beta test.
Okay but at this point why even add it in the first place? If they simply do not wish to have entire grass changes done at runtime along with the fact that they want a more sophisticated grass system, why not simply just develop that newer system instead of hyping out a pretty useless grass length slider (that will still be kept for months to years in studio)?
I already answered this. They’re wanting to get this out to developers as early as possible. This is a beta test, as mentioned in the title.
If this bothers you, I don’t see the point in commenting here about it. You’re not required to use anything here. You’re more than welcome to wait for a full release.
Because… lots of people desperately wanted this, and it was probably easy to do, and someone probably found some time for it. This is literally what we want. We want short term imperfect solutions rather than waiting half a decade for anything we need now. In fact, this is a once in a blue moon thing to see. What on earth are you complaining about. Their goal is to remove it for something better, while still enabling developers to achieve their artistic vision in the meantime.
You are 100% sure with the fact that they do have more things in the pipeline for any sort of new feature/project compared to the average joe working on a unity grass shader. I don’t doubt that they simply just don’t put in any work at all however i still find it very infuriating how they can just randomly hype out some of the most bottom of the barrel features only to release them in a pretty unusable state (To the point they can actually be damaging to one’s experiences, main example would have to be the In Doors Environment Reflection’s update which i would have to say it was on the same kind of level as this grass slider update). Also its even more infuriating when they’re constantly blabbering about some Metaverse or Stable Diffusion forks and ChatGPT forks they call as the future of ai or something like that (These things surely are at their priority list compared to the actual engine these features rely on to function).
Look man, this is a public place where anyone can share any thoughts about anything at any time (as long as they’re within TOS), I’m not sure why you think i should just simply shut up about a feature that is only here to hint at some future possibilities rather than just offer us the entire package by default. I’m complaining not just because they are releasing a pretty meaningless beta, but i am also complaining about the fact that this is the standard of updates roblox pushes. I’m not complaining because this is a small update but i am complaining about the fact that this update is merely just a small half existing pebble of an update added onto an already existing small feature that is being shown and hyped around as something “new” or crazy or whatever else buzzwords roblox would be more than happy to sadly use.
