Sorry for the delay in shipping this. We decided to make grass slightly shorter and bit more dense. The tweaks are coming out soon. We plan (and want to) ship grass to the clients before the end of the year. Canât promise that, but we all have the same goal here (engineers and you: devs :)). Ship the grass!
To answer some questions.
Painting
We are still figuring out the solution. We are looking for solution that will work long term in the future roblox and not just for grass. There are different ideas with different trade offs. For example custom material system with customizable decorations (you could create materials with long, short and no grass) vs. painting the decoration intensity into the terrain voxels). We are going to see how you guys use the grass for a bit and decide on what would work for you the most according to that.
Grass on parts
There is no plan to add grass to the parts at the moment.
Setting the size and density
Yes. That is planned. This is basically the same thing as the painting. We need to âsomehowâ extend data stored in the voxels for that, so everything said about the painting applies here.
For starters, we should be able to implement different grass textures bound to custom materials. Imagine a fantasy game with grassy fields and a dark forest on a single map. It would be unthinkable to force use to choose between a green default grass texture and a custom dark one, but not both at the same time.
The system should combine both, data stored in the materials and voxels so that we could have the highest customization.
Ok so really. We generally donât like shipping one trick ponies (wind only for grass is pretty much one trick pony). In the future there will be wind and weather that will affect everything. Including grass.
And terrain is not applicable in many cases. It is impossible to make sharp edges as the voxel size is locked to 4 studs. That might seem like enough, but it really isnât, even with the occupancy giving it a fake higher resolution.
I have been saying it a lot and will mention it again. Terrain should be a creatable instance with a dynamic grid size set to 4 by default. This would allow us to create low-detail terrain for non-accessible 3D skybox areas and high-detail terrain for effective material blending.
Even if this idea canât be implemented soon, having it on the backlog list of future updates would be awesome.
Phantom Forces, Apocalypse Rising 2, and quite a few other popular games use triangle-part terrain, and while their landscaping looks pretty good, âgrass on partsâ implementation would make it look at least 100% better.
The only issue is gameplay value. Phantom Forces will probably never use it because it will encourage camping while lying down behind corners where the grass still renders, while most open-world games wonât be able to use it in any meaningful way as it renders only at a short distance. Apocalypse Rising 2 probably wonât have any negative effects as you canât lie down.
But still having the ability to have grass is awesome for these types of games.
For Phantom Forces, having shorter grass could be fair because the developers could set the grass height to 0.25 - 0.5 studs so that the grass isnât flat, but short enough so that players cannot hide. Of course, the grass height property hasnât been implemented yet.
Having grassy parts in Apocalypse Rising 2 would be cool because their map is very open, and itâs hard to sneak around when others can spot you from a mile away.
In Pubg, grass is a very important feature because itâs one of the very few things players can use to their advantage during a round. If you are losing health, and you donât know where the enemy is, you can always duck down into the grass and try to get away.
PUBG doesnât render grass beyond around 100 meters. You can easily shoot anyone sneaking in it if your head is above the grass. ARMA is the only game I know that handles this issue correctly. They offset the character models vertically with distance, making it seem as if they are in grass even though it isnât rendered.
It would be cool if the streaming radius could affect the render distance for grass decoration. To compensate for the increased processing, disabling the grass movement beyond a certain radius might work.
In other words, quantity over quality in this case. If you are playing a shooter game, the last thing you are going to be paying attention to is the quality of realism for the grass - but what you will notice is a player crouching in non-rendered grass out in the distance. Which kind of goes back to your idea of having low-detail terrain out in the distance.
Is there a way to sneak in brighter grass before this is out? Iâd love to have snow grass but it just looks like this.
You could cheat it with extreme lighting adjustments but I donât want to do that to Jailbreak
i have the exact same problem,i just added patches of snow here and there.iâve tried using a plugin but it didnât work. It would be cool if roblox managed to find a way to replace a material (for example grass) with another material (snow in this case) on larger maps. For now,you could try to simulate hoar frost by decreasing the lighting and giving the grass a blue-ish white colour. That is pretty much what i did.
Thanks for the update! everything stated above sounds great! Ill be shore to send in more photos of my railway currently getting revamped, a mix of short and long grass will be important for my game, glad to see that its on the list.
theres a few plugins for converting terrain materials, the one i found seems to only work on newly built terrain places though⌠they seem to be all a bit buggy⌠a trick i do is recoloring the grass into white for winter time, but thats a bit limited.
