I think what @EchoReaper is trying to say is that a 0.01 size part is so small that Roblox may as well cut the crap and go ahead making 100% flat parts. One major advantage I can think of with using 0 size parts instead of 0.01 is that 0 size parts can easily fit between two parts, whereas 0.01 size parts would have a, well, 0.01 stud offset, completely throwing everything off.
Fair enough, but at that point Roblox should just fix issues with totally flat parts for the sake of making the physics engine more robust, i.e. it shouldn’t be an issue.
It’s non-negligible to a lot of devs in a couple of ways. A 0.01 part can be a meaningfully visible particle, laser beam, piece of metal, or wire, etc. If a Roblox avatar were the scale of a person, that would be about 3mm or 1/8" to them. That’s not paper or sheet metal thin, it’s more like cardboard box walls or diamond tread plate thickness. Devs are importing 0.01 and 0.02 things already for laser beams, wires, pencils, projectile trails. There are a lot of cases for which 0.2 is just too thick. I experienced this when making electrical arcs, 0.2 looks good from 100 studs away, but a spark from a few tens of studs away really needs to be about 0.025 thick to look realistic and not like blocks. 0.2 studs to the scale of the character is like 2.5 inches, great for a soda can, but not a pen or straw, or anything you want to look actually thin.
The real issue though is that a 0.01 part has volume, so it has mass and can be physically simulated, accelerated, pushed. Roblox is first and foremost a 3D physics simulation based game engine. Letting parts go to 0.01 doesn’t make them degenerate or cause singularities, or calculations to crash throughout the existing system. Actual zero would have a lot of issues. It would require special case code all over the place to tolerate zero-mass, zero-volume things and not subject them to calculations that assume positive, non-zero physical and geometry properties. This is not a limitation that someone just doesn’t want to deal with, it’s the consequence of properly implementing a Newtonian physics model as the top priority and core component of the engine.
Iam building my CSG models with part sizes far below 0.2 since end of 2015 ; and i neither noticed any selecting neither physics issues .
Same for all my meshparts which i simply scale in Blender to the needed roblox size → Since 1 square of the Blender floor grid is exactly 1x1 studs in dimension :
now when exporting the mesh with scale 0.01 it can have even a ingame scale of 0.01 if not even beyond.
i only once had a thin blade mesh with the size of 0.098 or so …physics worked pretty fine …even tough i used hull collision which made collision bit wider.
I cant imagine how and if physics ;of a part which is far smaller, work.
I maybe suggest a limit of 0.05 ? since i can still see and select it ^^
Also those smaller sizes and even the current limit of 0.2 finally need a camera which is easier to handle so close up .
The new closer clipping plane helped a lot BUT : as i already told in a suggestion post : WE NEED major improvements for the part tools dragging handles .
Even while working with parts of the size 0.2 the dragging handles are way too far away from the parts center !
also in order to not fully overwhelm building beginners ; and to not totally break even the workflow of an advanced builder i suggest making this new limit in studio a optional thing ;
meaning some button that has to be clicked in order to activate the new min size …or rather to deactivate the 0.2 limit.
Just got a spontaneous but maybe great idea in order to help ppl finding even current small parts
Someone here know games like borderlands where stuff like dropped money and weapons got marked by some sort of colored light beam ?
maybe we could press or click a button in studio which shows something similar coming out of every part ? some thin optically easy noticeable line which maybe could even end at its top with a thick ball :
Which we could click in order to select even the smallest part
or maybe even some other highlight function to show some sort of circle or ball at the parts center which scales based on camera distance ; so when clicking this optical highlight the part gets selected (:
This could be really useful for many things.
I agree with that it may be difficult to select those small objects as @Mistertitanic44 explained. His solution sounds fine as well.
Anyway making the small / thin things e.g chains, blades for swords or daggers, belts, belt buckles, etc. can be really difficult if you can’t go smaller than 0.2.
I think the priorities of this subject should be the MeshParts and UnionOperations. I think it’s okay to have regular parts have the same behaviour as well though.
And if some people dislike this, perhaps make an option to enable / disable the size restriction in Studio?
Hence rounding 0 to 0.01 for physics calculations. Every question of “how would size=0 parts handle case xyz?” already has an answer with unions which can be size=0 on all but one axis IIRC.
.01 minimum is a great start, when porting over meshes from CAD or Blender, this would help a lot. I’ve had the issue so many times when I port a project over and scale it down, it can’t be small enough to scale properly with the rest of the meshes. I’m not a fan of building in studio anymore, so I import a lot of stuff over from CAD, so this would allow me to do even small and more detailed projects.
Example of what I’m talking about;
Before scaling https://gyazo.com/e84c172361ec17c4de98af97fabd8655
And After; https://gyazo.com/60ee2a8363db70f068f5641a046337c0
We will look into the issues regarding the Selection Box. 0.05 will most likely be the new limit while we work on engine changes to support 0.01 in the future.
There’s no realtime feedback for suggestions – they have to be brought up and discussed in meetings, which isn’t an instantaneous process. You’ll just need to be patient when suggesting changes.
