Material graph based custom shaders

I also really wish for this to be added. As of late I’ve been toying around with GLSL and SKSL shaders in code, and I would really love to be able to toy with creating custom shaders within Roblox. This would give so many new possibilities for developers to improve or customize how their game looks, and give their own stylized look. Please Roblox, we the development community really would love this.

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As nice as this would be, it probably wont ever happen due to security risks.

Honestly, I think Roblox should just add a ton more postprocessing effects which would solve like half of the use cases of this feature request.

That wouldn’t cover even 5% of use cases… Besides cluttering the API, shaders like terrain deformation would be nearly impossible, if not extremely limited. You’d be adding a bunch of classes that maybe 10% of devs will ever use.

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The problem with your reply is that you’re of the potential uses cases for a feature like this, I’m referring to what I believe most people will actually do with this. The vast majority of people are never going to touch shaders, and even if they do, few will do anything besides very simple stuff.

I agree. And let’s be honest, if Roblox already takes a lot of time to add any new feature related to rendering imagine the time it would take for them to add new rendering stuff and make sure it works with the Shader Graph(basicaly an entire life wich will delay a lot of cool stuff they might wanna add). But I believe that they might add a shader graph or another method of customizing the rendering at some point when their rendering code gets better.

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Like so many others have mentioned, this has been something ppl have been wanting for SO LONG. So many games would benefit from this!

I still cant believe we dont have this. Shaders should be added asap!

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bump, this is a feature I’ve wanted ever since my start in game development

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roblox has to work on this so bad, all roblox games looks same bruh

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Bumping this because it really feels like a must-have for the direction Roblox is going in terms of games and their quality, but also it’s a future most other game development engines have and is utilized very often by said developers.
to add to this as tabby0x mentioned:

And if you do look into the subject about its vulnerabilitys, you will see that it’s only dangerous to allow the developers to write their own HLSL or shader code. And that if it were provided to the players as a shadergraph (as it should for its player base), it would be pretty safe.

tbh i would mostly love to hear from a roblox admin on this topic.

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Bumping because this is a must have feature to make a game truly unique and would allow for some really amazing visuals in Roblox. Glass already has a distortion effect so this is definitely something possible for Roblox to add.

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Keep this thread alive, people! We still want this feature because there is no way to make:

• Motion Blur
• Procedural Noise Textures
• Rippling Water (without terrain or tiled glass meshparts)
• Lens Distortion

It could also make games more compact because of procedurally generated textures, instead of baked textures.

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Roblox made an entirely new lighting engine (Future) so it wouldn’t be out of reach for Roblox to do us a favor and give us a shader graph editor.

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Allow us to easily change the rendering engine being used with this feature as well

Roblox, please just add custom shaders already. It’s been so many years.

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Put a hold on your lazy AI features and give us some creative freedom

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What could be unsafe about shaders? I don’t understand. Do you mean malicious embedding of images maybe?

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Those are pretty significantly different things. This isn’t a trivial problem, mainly due to shader compilation, but it would be great to have.

On the topic of security, apparently OpenGL’s compiler is third-party and was never security testing, so shader code could have ACE exploits. There’s a writeup that I’m sure has been spread around that gets into the nitty-gritty of it all if you want to check it out:

I think the shader graph style will make malicious hacks less of a problem because Roblox will control what inputs and outputs you can use, and not just be a big computer-takeover sandbox. Of course, there’s also the possibility that users could trick the server into accepting non-material-graph shaders, but if Roblox put security measures in place such that the shaders could only contain information pertaining to graphics programming, then I don’t see an issue on that. I am definitely not a shader expert, not even a shader enthusiast, but I’ve written some GLSL and you can get a lot done with only basic inputs.
About 1/3 of the stuff in the post went way over my head but I think the main issue is that they don’t want to complicate beginner’s lives with intricate tools such as shaders. Because they don’t trust most people to use shaders right, they don’t trust anybody (except for employees ofc) to use shaders right, which is kind of a shame.

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I believe the main reason is that it’s difficult for them to implement due to technical limitations with how Roblox operates, not necessarily that people who don’t know what they’re doing misuse it (which is more of a subpoint).

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