Let us toggle Terrain.Decoration on runtime

[TwentyTwoPilots (twonty)]

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to create decent / performant looking terrain for every caliber of device because we’re not allowed to toggle the Terrain.Decoration feature on runtime. I want to be able to disable it for mobile for performance’s sake, but leave it enabled on PC for graphic’s sake.

Unless I’m missing some hidden tech incapabilities, this is an asinine restriction that serves no purpose. You’re able to change the property on the fly in a running Studio test session, so I see no legitimate reason as to why the ability to change it live should be restricted.

If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I’d be able to offer better performance in my experience for mobile devices, while offering better graphics for devices capable of handling it.

[filiptibell]

This is a duplicate of this thread, and the official response from Roblox was:

Introducing Grass

It is not scriptable for a reason. We expect to remove the Decoration setting with the extension to the whole decoration system and we dont want you to be dependent on it in scripts. This way we are making sure that we are not gonna break games much with its (possible) removal in the future.

@TwentyTwoPilots

this is an asinine restriction that serves no purpose

Seems like the restriction is because they don’t want to break games when the property gets removed, which makes sense. Why that is taking so long (coming up on 2 years) is a different question, though.

[TwentyTwoPilots (twonty)]

I guess, though I still maintain keeping features nerfed like that because they might decide to change them anywhere between 2-10 years from now is pretty obnoxious.