really like the top pic there, looks cool
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This is a great step in the right direction, as currently I feel like designing landscapes leaves much to be desired.
I would love to see the ability to replace the default mesh and texture for the grass since creating a truly custom terrain feels limited by the style of the grass.
Although many developers focus on landscapes without grass to ensure their experiences are accessible to a larger demographic, I believe I am not alone when I share my desire to create an experience for higher end devices such as consoles, and PC.
Thank you for taking the community feedback and pushing towards making this possible!
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I have a suggestion which might have been considered.
Why give developers access to the properties of the default grass mesh, it’s texture and allow them to test techniques and provide specifics on their chosen technique and the results?
I understand that this is a massive undertaking and I am personally thankful the team is working diligently to find a solution that provides an issue-free experience, so thank you!
I would love to see the ability to replace the default mesh and texture for the grass since creating a truly custom terrain feels limited by the style of the grass.
Could you elaborate on it? Do you mean better looking and more detailed grass for the high end devices?
The short answer is yes.
However I do have a TL:DR not a rant but just my thoughts.
I believe that for users on mobile devices such as phones, or laptops, Studio API could force the grass to be the default grass which I believe is just 3 vertices, 1 face, and the material is double sided.
My believe is that users with the processing power to both build and join experiences that are beyond the capability of a mobile device myself included, would absolutely appreciate the ability to change the grass beyond the current limitations, something as mundane as having the ability to change the shape of the spawned blades would bring a positive drastic impact to the visual aspect of the terrain. There are plugins to help place imported models and we have the ability to simply create our foliage using external tools but from my perspective, I believe that allowing close to 9 million users upload textures, 3d models of grass is far less efficient than using 3d textures. I also have considered the processing power used server side to host these files indefinitely since there is no way to delete any uploaded models and textures.
Here’s an example what the texture would look like:
I do understand that a change this small would require a massive leap in development due to roblox’s rendering processes which are at the core of the engine, but I have faith that one of these days we’ll hear that Roblox Staff is working with the most well-known, experienced developers on the platform to improve not only the grass but the entire terrain system for something more modern.
Hey @NxhFam,
First off, a big thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts. It’s always great to see such detailed and thoughtful feedback from our developer community.
I totally get where you’re coming from with the ideas about improving the grass and terrain visuals. It’s these kinds of suggestions that really push us to think about what’s possible and how we can make the Roblox experience even better.
Right now, our team is deep into some core improvements that touch on the terrain structure and how things look and feel in general. It’s a big task, and we’re pretty excited about the direction we’re headed.
While we might not be able to jump on your specific suggestions right this moment, they’re definitely on our radar. It’s important for us to know what the community is keen on seeing, and it helps shape our plans for the future.
@neutrinostack I am a firm believer that communication is not designed to appease the individual but to help bring awareness to the things that impact us as a whole.
The development community on Roblox is perhaps one of the most eclectic communities of any development software with users not only helping one another in the forums but also giving so much to the very community that helped them hone their own skills.
I’ll take a moment to share some of the community accomplishments that although aged, still manage to leave my mind wandering, and nurture my curiosity for how we can improve this community, our community.
First are these two masterpieces of programming by @paricdil
One give you the ability to create beautiful smooth roads without having to manually set a single part down, or worrying about their individual alignment, and the other uses OpenStreetMap to import any part of the world you want to model you game after.
Another honorable mention for the ingenuity is @filiprodak with Bakey which although a performance killer, it’s the coolest attempt at creating an alternative solution to how we look at lighting in a scene.
I could go on all day but I’ll close this conversation with one of the plugins I mentioned in my previous reponse.
None other than @XAXA with Brushtool!
I can say in true confidence that the future is nothing short of promising for this platform.
Thank you for your time, and best of luck to the team in their current and future endeavors!
I think it would be great here to also mention that being on the radar that every Roblox staff says at this point means it that it may come sometime in 5 years or more. Because let’s face the facts that the 90% of the resources from the developers are focused on making the metaverse that nobody cares about.
But it’s not your fault @neutrinostack because you just take orders but I am sure that someone like you that works internally know this very well. Let’s just be honest at this point that there is barely any work on Engine innovations at this point.
@NxhFam Trust me it’s not his fault, he is just a programmer at Roblox taking orders. People like neutrin understand very well the problems on the platform from our side as developers, Its the people who decide on how things will get done.
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I can’t necessarily say that I share the sentiment.
I’ve looked at a very high level overview of what it would take to improve the Roblox Engine, take for example the Legacy Humanoid Controls.
The legacy humanoid controls are at a point where adding any additional features would likely start causing bugs, so instead they had to create a separate controller manager instance. You can check out the details in this experience: Simulated Characters - Roblox
I believe the desire to do everything we’re asking for is there, but the internal team is looking at a codebase that is utterly outdated and all they’re able to do is expand the functionality of the current core engine features in essence is creating what to us is the equivalent of modules.
The purpose of this conversation was not to get result tomorrow, next month or even the next year, it was to continue shedding light on one of the features that the community sees as important, and it accomplished just that.
I do understand the frustration of having to wait but if any of us were in their shoes we would be hitting our keyboards against the screen no later than the 3rd day. 
This would be a huge improvement to the engine. Currently devs are doing hacky ways to put parts on top of terrain. A tiny change could instantly boost the performance of countless experiences.
Seriously. I need this so much! Please roblox
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This is probably a dumb question. I’m using this beta feature for the grass height. It looks great. When I published my game to Roblox, the grass height is the old/normal tall height. I assume that is because the new feature is beta and not yet implemented in production. Can anyone verify?
Thanks,
Leif_aw
That’s right! We’re preparing for production Beta to go out ASAP. Stay tuned!
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If you’re on the terrain team, is there any talk of implementing paint-by-voxel internally? The way painting terrain works currently uses a binary string which is not helpful if you want multiple colors of grass for example.
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All those proposed future features for grass, and foliage in general really, are super necessary to make landscapes that don’t feel completely and utterly dead. So very happy to hear they should be coming. Wish it was already here
I don’t really understand the reasoning behind not making the grass length scriptable just because its not in final form. Would have taken too much time or? Can’t have it grow now… Guess it’ll have to stay short. Too bad.
Edit: oh the grass height itself isn’t even implemented in published games yet… Oh damn. Glad to hear it’s coming soon
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It would be great if we developers had a grass painting tool, where we could choose the height of the grass and its color, I don’t know how the Roblox terrain works, but maybe you can save two pieces of information in each terrain voxel, one is the height of the grass and the other is its color, if the height is 0 there will be no grass, Then the current grass system would check the data and apply the height and color according to the corresponding voxel.
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this going public soon or what?
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Is there an estimated time frame for published places to see the grass length change in effect?
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