Improved Water with the Shorelines Beta

[LightBeamRays]

Update

@LightBeamRays

Hello Creators!

All critical Shorelines bugs that were reported to us up to now are fixed!
We are still working through a Terrain tooling issue related to Shorelines at the moment. Thanks for sharing your experience with Shorelines so we can make it better .

We are moving Shorelines to Beta Opt-out, which means that everyone will get the UI to upgrade their places with Shorelines enabled by default (it will not execute the upgrade for you though, you still have to choose to proceed with the upgrade). As previously, the upgrade can be completed directly through the Shorelines pop-up or through the Terrain Editor menu. The pop-up can be disabled with the “Do not ask me again” checkbox. You can find more details in the announcement post.

The same warnings are in place.

Finally we’ve also updated all our templates to use Shorelines. If you create a new placefile from one of Roblox’s Studio templates, those places will already be upgraded with Shorelines.

If you meet any new issues with Shorelines, please let us know!

Announcement

Hi Developers!

We are so hyped to launch the Shorelines Beta today! Shorelines is our upgrade to the way terrain water meets other terrain materials. With the Shorelines upgrade, water smoothly hugs the shores, its edges being unconstrained by voxel vertices and able to freely animate following the waves.

Before & After

Shorelines work by allowing a terrain voxel to contain both water and another terrain material. An additional change you may notice while developing is that we extend the water surface’s geometry past the actual shore, to allow for a smooth connection. Shorelines bring major changes in our water implementation so please take time to read our warnings below.

Please note that if you are working in Team Create and you upgrade, everyone working on your place will see the Shorelines upgrade even if they don’t have the Beta enabled.

We highly recommend that you make a copy of your place before clicking “upgrade” with the Shorelines Beta

How to upgrade

The Shorelines upgrade is applied per place. You have the freedom to decide whether you’d like to proceed with the Shorelines upgrade for each of your places independently.

1. Please make a backup/copy of your place. The upgrade cannot be reverted after you save your place even if you disable the Beta (more details below).

2. Enable the Shorelines Beta if it’s not enabled yet
   File > Beta Features > Upgrade Shorelines [Restart Studio as prompted]

3. Open a place that you have previously backed up.

4. Once your place opens up, a pop-up will ask if you’d like to upgrade Shorelines. Click “Upgrade” if you’d like to proceed. You can dismiss the message if you’d like to upgrade at a later time.

   

5. If you clicked “Upgrade” you’re done!

6. If you have clicked “Dismiss” or if the popup isn’t showing for your place anymore, you can do the upgrade in Terrain Editor > “Create” tab > “Upgrade Shorelines” dropdown > “Upgrade” button.

   

Enjoy the Shorelines Upgrade!

Warning #1: Edits post-upgrade are expected

Shorelines brings great visual improvement to water, but inherently, it changes the water’s behavior when it meets with other terrain materials. This means proceeding with the upgrade might change your place’s water bounds.

While most simple cases will be handled seamlessly, you might need to edit your terrain after the upgrade so that water lines up again with your original intention. Streams, waterfalls, non-horizontal water surfaces, and workarounds to the old water system are likely to require some edits. Please let us know if you face blockers or important pain points to achieve your intended look.

Tip: If you built workarounds to the old water system to get better looking shores, such as manually reshaping shorelines or inserting parts to hide the artifacts, you may get better results by removing the workarounds before upgrading.

Warning #2: You cannot revert the upgrade once it’s saved

After proceeding with the upgrade you will be able to undo it with the usual “undo” commands (, CTRL/⌘ + Z). However, we don’t provide a revert functionality for Shorelines, and disabling the Beta will not roll back the upgrade. Once you have saved your place, you will only be able to revert the upgrade using your place’s Version History. This is why we recommend that you make a backup of your place before trying Shorelines.

Why? We have considered providing a revert button. However, Shorelines’ reverting functionality would have been non-deterministic. This means we would not have been able to guarantee you’d get the original state of your water back if you did terrain edits between the upgrade and reverting. To avoid confusion and frustrations, we chose not to offer the option. “Undo” and the Version History guarantees you get your original terrain back.

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Made with love

Shorelines was achieved with the remarkable contributions of @Hyperhumanist, @ProtoValence, @wcai_rblx, @PixelMiner47, @RBLXImagineer, and @JoshSedai. Thanks for your help and support in making Shorelines!

We’re super excited to hear your thoughts on Shorelines! Let us know about your experience and if you encounter any issues.

Thank you!

[Aspecky]

It would be super cool to have the foam effect in shorelines now, this will bump the realism to the next level!

[ThatOneUnoriginal (Unoriginal)]

Another step towards creating more realistic terrain, thanks for this update!

[Minecraftcaleb53]

I hope this new feature won’t get “watered down”

[TheCrypticRunner (Cryptic)]

I audibly gasped when I saw the post. I’m not joking, I’m glad the day has finally come! I’m still using part water right now, but further improvements to the terrain water like optimization, foam, waves actually affecting physics objects and customizable visual effects might make me use terrain water.

[SimonEnderB]

Seeing the word “water” in the announcements category is enough to make any developer scream. Finally, one of the “one day” features has been added!

[VGVC2]

SO. MANY. YEARS. HAVE. I. BEEN. WAITING. FOR. THIS. DAY.

That’s all I need to say about this. cries tears of joy

Except a glaring issue as of right now is the terrain tears quite jarringly with new shorelines active in a place.

[MagmaBurnsV]

Well, I for one am still waiting on a Water Material.

Terrain water is great and I’m rooting for improvements, but the voxel system in itself is just too restrictive and slow for it to be used for anything else than an ocean.

Adding it as a material would open up many graphical possibilities.

[aTinyGecko (TinyGecko)]

This is 5000 times better

W for Water

[lolmanurfunny (lolman)]

This is amazing. The jagged edges are no more!

[CxSyntac (Syntac)]

Very Nice! Glad to see the engine is improving once again! Similar to the updates to the Shorelines, I would be very interested in seeing a way to edit control and customize shorelines one day, as well as even have ways to include Water Currents, Water Depth Effects (How clear the water is in certain areas) etc etc!

Really healthy change in my opinion, no more having to do tedious tricks in order to fix clamping issues!

[ItsKoiske (Koiske)]

@VGVC2

Except a glaring issue as of right now is the terrain tears quite jarringly with new shorelines active in a place.

I hope this gets patched up soon and hopefully you have a back up for the game as well.

[SkyWarrior805]

This, or the ability to change textures on the shoreline and change the water texture.

[SelDraken]

Will this work with water that is created at runtime such as with a terrain generator

[7z99 (cody)]

So does this mean we can have water with sharp edges without the weird beveling effect near the edges? Or is it just solely how water interacts with other terrain?

[SelDraken]

This is having issues with water I am creating at runtime.

Apparently I only parses terrain that already exists, as in the picture below

but not terrain, as in the first picture, doesn’t quite get the effect.

[BIGHEAD_RIPOFF (BIGHEAD_RIPOFFWX)]

This is such an amazing update for the Water Engine! Finally, we get some good updates in 2023.

[Crimsonisms]

This looks awesome, can’t wait to use it, can you also add flowing lava?

[PeZsmistic]

OGH it even smooths out the stairstepping problem I had here holy moley.

So smoof