As a Roblox user and developer, it’s become a headache point of friction that several developers still insist on using R6 instead of R15 for a wide variety of reasons, including:
Consistency in character hitboxes, animation, and overall size.
Consistent character physics and mechanics that don’t put one character size at an advantage over another.
Simpler rigs that are more flexible and forgiving of unrealistic limb placement in animations.
An insistence on the simpler aesthetic of old Roblox avatars.
Try as they might, Roblox has not been able to kill off new applications of R6 and it’s always annoyed me that I can’t bring my layered clothing into these games.
I’ve been thinking of a universal solution to this problem which should be applicable to most if not all cases. What if… visually loading R15 limbs into the rig of an R6 character was as simple as pointing a CharacterMesh at a limb asset on the website?
Instead of baking a separate R6 version of the R15 limb, it could instead be magically grandfathered into the assembly of the character’s composed mesh—its skinning and hierarchy preserved, but adjusted to better fit the proportions of R6, and otherwise physically the same.
This may cost more engineering effort than it’s worth, which is why I don’t expect Roblox to do this themselves. But I’m personally going to make an attempt at developing a solution like this in Luau and thought it might be worth proposing as an engine-level feature that could be done on the C++ side of things. It’d be a scuffed hack, but reasonably backwards compatible and easier for those developers to implement into their games.
I use R6 in my game mostly because it’s way simpler to make R6 animations but it’s the only good side for me, it would be great if players could have R15 tech for a R6 rig like layered clothing and higher res accessories.
At this point in time, there is a huge split up between forced R6 (many games), forced R15 (barely anyone does this I think) and both (also many games). Clearly Roblox can’t just deprecate R6; if they try anything like that, there will be hundreds of “Roblox doesn’t care about …” threads. And it just doesn’t make sense, too many games force R6 for it to be viable at all.
I support your idea but I think Roblox should work on forcing a new rig that fixes these issues (animation difficulty will unfortunately still have to be dealt with, on that end Roblox can only make their tooling better for ease of animators) and it should be backwards compatible with R6 and R15. As in, R6 rigs can be converted to this new type without any loss of information.
We don’t really need another rig, as that would just be bloat. We’d have 3 rigs at that point. Imo there are two things in the way for R6 and R15 compatibility, which are: Official tools not supporting R6 and R15 styles (Like the animator), and code on R15 not supporting R6 (Like var names, array problems due to the extra limbs).
I think this idea is implying that R15 armatures and cages (Therefore things like layered clothing) in an R6 game will get preserved, while being compatible with R6 code and varnames. That would mean R15s running around as R6s ingame, but they’re all using R6 hierarchies due to the backend pointer swapping out their Body parts. I’m just guessing, but the effort for seamless transition is commendable.
If this backend based conversion idea works, and causes no need for patching on R6 developers, then great. Otherwise, custom avatar bodies will just have to save the day on the frontend.
Will be very interested on seeing any further developments from this post. Flood Escape 2 and many other strict platformers make use of the R6 rig because of its consistency, something R15 has still not been able to offer after all these years.