Grass is getting greener on this side! [GrassLength Studio Beta]

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.

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I’m not saying you can’t speak your mind, it’s just that what you’re saying is redundant. It’s not like this hasn’t been said many times by many other people. The reason I’m saying that I don’t see the point in commenting about that here is because it’s not productive. We all know that Roblox is leagues behind other engines still.

They have more than enough people to work on multiple features at a given time. What I’m saying is that they’re working on multiple things related to the same core systems. I’m probably not the best one to be explaining this, but working on a multi-platform engine for a platform like Roblox is much more complicated, especially when things have to be built at scale.

This is on a completely different level than somebody making a shader in Unity, which won’t just work for all platforms as you say. I’m sure you’ve seen many posts or devlogs of developers trying to figure out why some of their players crash while others don’t.

Most of these updates are a stable build. But that’s precisely why they can’t just release their more recent builds, because those aren’t stable enough for production.

You’ll even see with core updates like those related the Future Is Bright updates. Those betas required a whole custom demo build of Studio, one that couldn’t be used for production.

I for one am excited for AI, although not for the uses they’ve shown so far. I’m more interested in AI in relation to what I asked:


I partially agree with this. I do agree that Roblox needs to catch itself up-to-date with other engines (Unity at the very least). However, Roblox is working on most of these features simultaneously.

I wish that Roblox would be faster with these updates, just as much as you or anyone else. But this is what we have right now. While I still think Roblox could do better with transparency, at least they’re doing AMAs and roadmaps.

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My only suggestion to this feature would be able to make height zones, cause I like shortgrass some places and longgrass other places

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Amazing feature! Can’t wait to see when I put that in my game!

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cool feature
me likey
they finally paying attention to grass

the most untouched thing in roblox

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Imagine if instead of BasePart.Color existing, the Color was changed for every part using that material via MaterialService or something, that’s the current state of the terrain system. It’s very restrictive. Bragging about being able to globally change the length of grass 4 years after it was originally released is not a great look for Roblox engineering

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I appreciate Roblox making improvements and adding more custom abilities, but considering the HUGE amount of other more important (as far as creativity) features, such as mesh part tinting, custom colors and sizes per terrain regions, and most especially custom meshes for the terrain, it just makes this announcement seem sad.

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It has been almost 4 Years since grass has been released and its remained extremely limited. But after reading this post I have some hopes that this will bring some positive change. This looks like a really good addition so far and is nice step forward into more freedom with grass.

This particularly caught my eye, as this would mean that grass length would need to be stored per voxel. Is it possible for terrain color to be introduced the same way? Terrain color is and has remained only a Terrain property ever since it was introduced. It’s extremely limiting when designing environments, especially ones that include grass. The grass property is only limited to the grass terrain material. If you want to have green grass next to yellow grass, then you’re out of luck. The only thing you can do is apply hacky methods, such as tweening the color when the player enters a different area/region.

If we ever wanted to achieve environments like this it is impossible. Terrain also still doesn’t have support for Material Variants. The only thing you can do is replace already existing materials. We shouldn’t have to sacrifice materials when we want to create stylized environments. There should be an ability to create terrain material variants the same way we can do with parts.

Why is the lowest number we can go to 0.1 and not 0? We should have the ability to set grass length to zero, completely disabling it. As of right now the way we achieve this is by having Grass and LeafyGrass sharing the same texture.

Overall, it’s a really good direction for terrain grass to be heading into. I really hope that Roblox decides to expand upon it much more than just length. Especially with the promise of possibly having data stored per voxel. Hope this paves the road for more features that give us more freedom and possibilities when creating stylized environments.

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B-e-a-u tiful. Terrain and the dev tools for it have improved insanely over the last 3 years. Grass density / Grass decoration as a paint tool when :eyes:

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You can turn grass of by just toggling ‘Decorations’ under appearance in Terrain. Completely agree about how this is an amazing step in the right direction.

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Looks and sounds great.
One point though, maybe take the wind out of your example videos so people can see the actual length change better.

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This is a pretty cool update! Will there be plans to alter the length of grass in certain areas?

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I’m wondering, here’s this huge list of people, have been doing the grass length change for 2-3 years (if not more) I certainly like this update, but the delay is very long Hopefully the next grass and terrain update will be soon and won’t require waiting a few years.

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As if they gonna do that :joy: They never really listen to the community, only reason they let your reply to these posts is for people to feel like they’re doing something.

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Nice update! This is an W Update.

This is a feature I have been wanting for so long and I couldn’t be more happy! My only question is if we will ever see more types of decorations or have the ability to add a custom texture to the grass?

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It would be nice to change the shape/type of grass, but I don’t think it would be performant to actually apply textures to said grass. Games that have textured grass tend to use billboard grass, rather than the kind of grass we see here. If you look at modern games, they apply shaders in a way to make grass look less plain.

Here are a few videos explaining that better:

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Hi @Daw588!

Re: more flexibility & customization,
(+ @MightyDantheman, @Ron1n_Sim, @deathcharge415, @Disgustedorito, @focasds, @WoahItsJeebus, @BabulCNC, @HaClix, @LootRPG, @Evercreeper, @ona2000, @Dunelight, @9vvo)

Thanks for your feedback! We’re aware of these pain points and are committed to giving creators more flexibility.

To give a bit of context, offering a flexible decoration/terrain customization system (that can also have various settings per areas of the world) depends on overhauling and rebuilding some foundations of the Terrain system while trying to keep things stable on the surface for you all.

We’re currently working really hard to get our systems to a state where flexible customization will be possible and be able to address most of these pain points (and improve Terrain performance too!). These are very intricate efforts and it will take more time, but we really care about being able to give you that creative flexibility. Meanwhile, we wanted to get this out because we believe many creators will still benefit from having GrassLength even though it is limited to the whole world today.

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Yeah when it becomes scriptable then we can create like lawnmowers or something that’ll be able to mow lawns!

Maybe flowers and stuff… who knows, only y’all do, actually I’m not sure if there are already flowers.

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Hey @ona2000!

Re: Support Multiple MaterialVariant
(+ @Daw588, @MightyDantheman)

Totally! We know this is very critical for creators to be able to achieve their creative vision and that the current state is painful for many. I don’t have anything to announce about this today, but it is on our radar.

Re: Value range

Grass can be disabled entirely by disabling the “Decoration” property. When “Decoration” is enabled, we assume there should be some grass, which is why conceptually the min value is above 0. Let me know if this addresses your use case or if it remains an issue.

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