With the catalog release of Facial Animation (previously known as Dynamic Heads) right around the corner, we have introduced a new Character property called EnableDynamicHeads. This is a 3-phase property where the Default is currently set to Enabled on all experiences. This will allow players that have equipped heads with facial animation to bring them into your experiences.
Access EnableDynamicHeads:
Within Explorer, select StarterPlayer
Navigate to the Character section in the Properties window
Look for EnableDynamicHeads. When you click on it, 3 options will appear:
Default (Currently set to Enabled)
Disabled (Select this option if you wish to opt-out of this feature)
While this feature will work without any updates to your experience, it has a non-negligible additional memory footprint. An experience that was already very memory intensive may see reduced performance or stability on lower-end devices, so you may want to opt-out in that case.
Only R15 experiences will be able to play facial animations.
As always, please let us know if you run into any issues and share your feedback on how we can continue to improve this feature.
I don’t understand what went into the decision of having this feature as an opt-out and not an opt-in. What statistics did Roblox use to approach the default setting? I’m not ecstatic at all about needing to edit a number of experiences to turn this off. Being non-mindful of an experience’s aesthetic is one thing but the fact that there’s a non-negligible memory cost that developers can’t experiment with first before deciding if they want it…? Unwise.
The scope of my experience’s customisation demands rejecting player-applied appearances or anything more than basic avatar assets so there’s at least two experiences with traffic on any given day that I don’t want any rollout on. Knowing ahead of time would allow me to disable the setting comfortably. It’s a minor inconvenience but not one I’m unwilling to deal with. Time can make a difference though.
The technical concerns have been mostly resolved (besides the Animator’s involvement) but additional clarifications and reassurances haven’t put my case to rest. I still want to know what was considered in the way this feature was shipped and why it wasn’t the expected flow of trial-first.
I’m curious to see what developers end up doing with this feature, certainly enables a new genre of games to release and helps immerse individuals into this metaverse. After getting to test it, it seems to have alot of potential for creating more immersive experiences!
With that being said will we have the ability to access properties or events associated with the dynamic heads that allow developers to have a more realistic experience i.e. player speaking in a game that has a cold / arctic environment resulting in the condensation coming off the character’s mouth which would happen in real life.
Also the default setting of enabled as previously mentioned could result in potential hiccups for developers that haven’t had a chance to make the decision for themselves, to have dynamic heads enabled.
What statistics do they ever use?
They always do what is in their interest, they most likely want to push this out to everyone to encourage the use of the newer character models. Having it as a feature means people don’t have to opt in to at least see it and form an opinion.
I can’t remember what feature it is, but there was a feature which came out where not many people where turning on so could this be why they are auto turning it on? Also with people purchasing (or at least I think with it being in the category in the avatar shop) they probs want as many devs to use it as possible.
Er… Normally these things start with the default set to disabled and it later is changed to enabled after a trial period. You may have potentially broken my game on low end phones with me being nowhere near my workstation to fix it. I already have high memory pressure. Please don’t do that.
I personally think this should be opt in forever, with the default always being disabled, never set to enabled, as (I’m assuming) it breaks any games that rely on switching character faces since it likely does not use decals. This is not a feature like adaptive physics where games can somewhat still function even after the default is changed, this will likely cause games to break with no way to play them unless the developer updates the game.
Although I will have this feature enabled for my games, it is very understandable that other developers might not want the extra memory usage, increased CPU and GPU usage, or dynamic heads simply don’t make sense for their game. For better backward compatibility, it would make more sense if this feature was disabled by default for already existing experiences while new experiences have it enabled by default.
