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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
