The first Beta of this was good but you know, you could only have one variant for each material, this Beta added this and that really made this Beta powerful and the fact that the terrain is also changable. Good job!
So cool to see roblox graphics slowly but surely getting better and better.
Not entirely related but if I’m gonna be using this update this stupid decoration feature is getting disabled in my game.
Realistically I think if people are gonna use this update the Introducing Grass update is gonna need to be put back on priority.
Really, to fix this, the grass beams need to be able to be customized to the same extent we can customize materials now, and even more. Example being the beam texture and all the other property’s that a beam object has, just for grass. From what I can tell, grass like that is a bunch of highly optimized beams with moving attachment points, so it should not be too hard for Roblox themselves to-do, it can be done by adding in object properties to the terrain instance. Also the lighting in there is because the grass is not transparent, and it emmits no shadow.
We’re aware of the grass color mismatch issue. It will get addressed before final release.
Do you know when the grass feature will ever be reintroduced? I don’t mean to sound like a karen here but It wasn’t much of grass to begin with. I had made a message with a few other popular devs and the team that worked on the grass feature although non of them responded. If you can forward this to the correct team that’d be great. Its honestly depressing seeing the current state the “grass” update is currently in.
Message
Exactly 968 days ago on 2019-08-10T04:00:00Z was the RDC 2019. A feature was displayed on the big screens known as Terrain Vegetation.
Precisely 93 days later the post announcing Introducing Grass was created on 2019-11-11T05:00:00Z releasing this update into Public Beta for games to use in Studio. Exactly one month later or 30 days 22 weekdays and 8 weekend days later this feature was released into all platforms.
Looking into the post created on 2019-11-11T05:00:00Z it included a few key details that would soon be added in addition to the feature releasing.
A few of those features being
Now those are just the ones displayed on the post, the visualization of this feature displayed in the RDC looked way better than what was released into production, perhaps you may have forgotten as its been 3 years so lets refresh your memory.
RDC 2019 Live Stream (Day 1) - Opening Ceremony + Keynote Speakers - YouTube
Incase you missed it that was the short summary of what was visualized in the early stages of Terrain Vegetation, as you may notice the grass is
- Swaying:
- Looks like grass
- Interacts like grass
- Has Flowers
What was promised
- Dynamic Collisions
- Procedurally Generated
- Large-Scale and Efficient
- “Small” objects {Grass, Bushes, Rocks, Flowers}
- Customizable
What was received
- Procedurally Generated
- Large-Scale and Efficient
- Tall Triangles
Not much more was added.
What can be done
You’ve made it easy on yourself, as the Decoration Property under terrain was never scriptable you aren’t going to be breaking any scripts.
Remove the Decoration Property
Alternative? Sure, follow in the footsteps of creating a new instance just like the Clouds. It’ll only be functional under the Terrain instance as its a Terrain Functionality and it’ll share these properties.
Grass - New Instance
Properties
Data
- Archivable | Boolean
- ClassName | Readable
- Name | String
- Parent | Instance
Terrain Overrides
- Asphalt | Instance
- Basalt | Instance
- Brick | Instance
- Cobblestone | Instance
- Concrete | Instance
- CrackedLava | Instance
- Glacier | Instance
- Grass | Instance
- Ice | Instance
- LeafyGrass | Instance
- Limestone | Instance
- Mud | Instance
- Pavement | Instance
- Rock | Instance
- Salt | Instance
- Sand | Instance
- Sandstone | Instance
- Slate | Instance
- Snow| Instance
- WoodPlanks | Instance
State
- Enabled | Boolean
GrassVarient - New Instance
Properties
Data
- Archivable | Boolean
- ClassName | Readable
- Name | String
- Parent | Instance
Appearance
- BaseMaterial | Dropdown
- Object | Instance – Mesh that will be used for procedural generation in that terrain
Data
- Density | float
- Scale | NumberSequence
State
- Enabled | Boolean – has its own Enabled Property as you should be able to use multiple GrassVarients in one MaterialRegion
This is all I will be providing, I ask you read it through and use a lot of ideas from the MaterialService update
Any plans for adding the ability to add different materials/colors on every face of a part?
One thing, please add the MaterialPattern property to normal parts! It would be SUPER useful to create natural materials, since the part system has a real bad tiling issue.
And a solid option, for materials like concrete.
There is no solid plan for grass or more decorations yet.
Thanks for the information, I now know why the water Texture I used from the local assets doesn’t work on Mobile. I thought it was just a rendering issue, but honestly thanks.
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When you say “remove them”, do you mean so they stop working totally and will give loading errors?
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By water material I mainly referred to the effects it creates, though is probably going to be hard, noting that most materials don’t even move or deform something.
Once again, thank you!
“Remove them” means remove from roblox client, so those assets don’t exist anymore, will give errors.
Now we’ve started loading material images from cloud assets, we might remove some local material assets in the future.
Will you be replacing the current materials or adding built in variants?
If you are replacing them what will happen to shipped games, and will you be providing the older textures?
They literally said that there will be a “toggle” property to enable those materials
Wow!! Love this updated!! Happy to see that the initial backlash against the 2022 materials caused this re-evaluation!! Will there be more in the future?
This is a pretty cool update! I’m still hoping we get skybox layering/transparency/fading at some point, though, as it really does show it’s age when you have 0 skybox manipulation in something that’s supposed to be more of an engine than a game.
The inability to change the sides of terrain (grass basically being un-usable if you just want a big sphere of it) was definitely a major problem and I’m glad to see you can set it per-side now.
But skyboxes when tho
The only problem about this new feature is how you make the grass along with decoration on terrain.
Before the texture didn’t change depending on the terrain color which it does now.
So I had to make my terrain grass texture white so i later could change ít to green inside Roblox studio in the terrain colors section.
Now when i did so, i get these weird white outlines:
I think it is because the texture was white before. and now when i change it to green inside studio, those blends doesn’t quite change. If you all have any idea on how i can fix this, please reply back since i don’t want my terrain like this…
Do you have low graphics settings? The discolored blending textures seem to be very prominent on low graphics.