Migration to Shorelines and Old Water Deprecation

[LightBeamRays]

Hi Creators,

With Shorelines now fully released, we’ll be migrating all places to Shorelines and will fully deprecate our old water technology on September 16th. This means that on that date, all experiences will get automatically upgraded with Shorelines and benefit from its enhanced water quality, making your experience even more immersive.

Old water (left), Shorelines (right)

Today, we’re sharing the deprecation steps and key dates:

Deprecation Plan

Phase 1 (Migration): July 8, 2024

We will migrate all places that don’t have water to Shorelines. These places will see no visual differences and will not require any action from creators. This includes places that:

• Don’t use terrain at all (no land and no water)
• Use only terrain (land only)

Phase 2 (Deprecation): September 16, 2024

Old water technology will be fully removed. Places that have water will experience visual changes:

• Places using both water and land will now have Shorelines shores and might get some artifacts if you don’t upgrade manually before the deprecation.

Places using only water could have water voxels extend slightly, making water volumes thicker.

If your place uses water voxels, please review the impacts and recommended steps below.

Upgrade Now for a Seamless Transition

Upgrade to Shorelines ahead of time by going to Terrain Editor > “Create” tab > “Upgrade Shorelines” dropdown > “Upgrade” button. Running the upgrade script provides the best result for shores.

It is expected to have to make some adjustments to your shores after the Shorelines upgrade. For example, you might have to use the Terrain tools to correct areas where the automatic upgrade could not extend water far enough into land. Upgrading before the deprecation date avoids having to make rushed last minute changes to your shores if you need to edit them post-upgrade.

While Shorelines is stable, upgrading now will also give you time to report issues if you were to encounter any.

What Happens If I DON’T Upgrade

Impact on Places With Both Water and Land Voxels

When you upgrade Shorelines with the Terrain editor’s upgrade button, we run a Lua script extending the water surface to ensure a smooth transition between water and land.

However, if you don’t upgrade before the deprecation, your place will get migrated to shorelines without running this Lua script. Consequently, you may see artifacts at your shores, such as water curving down where it meets land like shown below.

Impact on Places With Only Water

If your place only uses water voxels and no land voxels, your water voxels might look slightly inflated in the X and Z axis as shown below.

If this is an issue for you, you can subtract the extra water using the Terrain Editor “Edit” tools shown below (Terrain Editor > Edit > …). For more information see our Terrain Editor documentation.

How to Upgrade After Old Water Deprecation

We will be keeping the upgrade script until December 13. You will still be able to execute the script in the Terrain Editor after Old Water deprecation, which can help you minimize the “water curving down” artifact shown above.

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As always, please let us know if you encounter any issues while trying to upgrade with Shorelines ahead of the deprecation.

[Fid6et (Fidget)]

I really like the new shorelines!
I’m looking forward to future terrain technologies; you guys should keep up the good work. This is a major improvement & will be looked back upon fondly by the community!

(W update)

[bvetterdays (roman)]

Have loved this improvement since the day it came out! The updated shorelines look so much better, can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t have enabled them.

[Real_Daytern (Daytern)]

It’s great that you’re giving places that use the terrain water feature more time to optimize their terrain. I really appreciate the improvements to the shores!

[HpacAm (Bobo)]

This is fantastic! I really like the Shorelines, i mean it makes the water better. Truly an great update!

[SillyMeTimbers (Silly)]

will there be any new effects like a foaming as it gets closer to a part or land?

[LightBeamRays]

Once we deprecate old water, water will look the same as what Shorelines look like today. This deprecation/migration process will not come with additional features for water.

[ahmedsaeed97 (24K)]

Huge thanks to Roblox for the Shorelines update! The new features allowing water to seamlessly blend with the terrain materials have truly enhanced the gaming experience. It’s impressive how water now naturally hugs the shorelines, free from the constraints of voxel vertices, and animates in sync with the waves. This upgrade has brought a significant improvement to the visual dynamics of Roblox worlds.

[sozzly]

Are there any plans to add the feature at a later date? I know in the original beta post it was heavily requested.

[Asa_Mitaka]

The water looks really nice compared to the old one, and in a way, it always felt kind of weird.

[gillern]

While this is a great update and its good to be sharing updates like this, at the end of the day this is a minor bug fix more than anything in the big picture. The first topic you guys posted about this was a year and a half ago. Even if only a single engineer worked on this, you guys have at least a $150k salary, probably a lot more, so it would’ve cost close to a quarter million for that engineer to develop this. In the first topic about shorelines there’s 6 engineers credited for working on this meaning it probably cost over half a million dollars to make it so water shorelines dont merge with solid terrain…

[Scottifly]

So I have a boat obby that was built with the original water voxels.
The transition to the new water wasn’t an issue, but my water is very space specific.
Will this make a huge change?

The reason it worked well before was that the original Terrain Water Voxels allowed you to make 4x4 stud blocks of water that were exactly the shape I needed. Voxels could be square, wedge shaped, corner wedges, etc.
When Terrain upgraded to the last update it worked out ok. The terrain didn’t change shape, but trying to edit it to get this exact kind of effect doesn’t work because the shapes just aren’t the same.

EDIT: I just tried it and it isn’t too different, but some of the specific shapes I made (a flat area in the shape of a symmetrical 8, a checkerboard of 4x4 water voxels, and precisely shaped jumps and gaps are a bit off.

I did notice this alarming effect though:
robloxapp-20240606-2125273.wmv (934.7 KB)
In a flat area moving the camera in and out of the water behaves like it should, with the ‘water’ view only happening while the camera is in the water. In this video you can see when I get about 2-3 studs above an area of water that isn’t smooth the camera thinks it’s in water when it isn’t.
It turns out that the surface of these 4x4x4 voxels dropped about 2 studs when I migrated to the new Shorelines, so they only appear to be 4x2x4 shapes compared to before. When I drive the boats over the new top surface they react physically according to the new ‘top surface’ and so does my avatar when swimming, but the camera appears to be sensing the old water ‘top surface’ still.

[2jammers]

Would be great if it was a toggle under the terrain instance, foaming is especially good for beaches

[MTL2010]

I am definitely gonna migrate my game to the next shorelines water for sure I don’t wanna look at the disappointing old water being all werid on the terrain now this is a problem solver I like it!

[SillyMeTimbers (Silly)]

i definitely feel like they over glorify a lot of these features in an attempt to hide what they are lacking.

clouds for an example was a huge disappointment.

decoration is a massive let down they made an entire post attempting to hype this new feature that you can change the height of your grass!! But you can only do it in studio and whatever height you choose is going to be the same throughout your entire game!!! yippe!

quality over quantity. i want one great feature that has customization over 5 new features that get forgotten about with little functionality.

props to the team on audio api they deserve an award that’s a great feature

[Abcreator]

@LightBeamRays

Phase 2 (Deprecation): September 16, 2024

Old water technology will be fully removed

I am still quite concerned that ‘deprecation’ and ‘removal’ are now being used seemingly interchangably as if they mean the same thing. Historically, on the platform, ‘deprecation’ didn’t refer to a feature being removed but rather discouraged for use, nowadays its sort of a gamble, sometimes it means discouraged for use, other times it means entirely removed.

[VGVC2]

Even though this could be “breaking” to some degree (somehow idunno), I sure would find it interesting to finally see old unmaintained places with upgraded shorelines!

[xyrafrost]

Why does the shoreline upgrader sometimes lower the height of water in my place by about 1 stud? I’m trying to convert all of my places now and this is the second time I’ve ran into this issue.

Luckily this is fixable with the terrain “Draw” tool.

[SelDraken]

I think its because the old water could be partial voxels, but from what I heard in another post, I think shorelines water takes up a full voxel. Not sure if that is totally accurate, but I read someone else say that in a previous post.