Well, the lighting we have still includes voxel lighting. I believe they said they wanted to remove that, but decided to add it back.
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I mean, perhaps they would keep it, but it seems really unlikely, in my opinion.
I’m pretty sure once graphics cards are more readily available, they’ll be removing not only compatibility lighting, but voxel as well. It’s just in Roblox’s “character” to do something like that, from my experience.
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They dont want to remove it because they still need it for lower settings.
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I don’t disagree with your points - all I’m saying is that, with some work and iteration, the current problems can be overcome and it can be made much more compatible with existing games without requiring developer intervention 
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That’s going to require an awful lot of changes though, like, an absolutely huge amount. Most of what they have currently would have to be shafted and reworked.
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Goodness gracious. I’m operating under the assumption the provided build is an extreme work in progress because the current state of the materials replacing the current part materials is completely unacceptable if they’re actually meant as replacements for existing materials.
I’m really hoping that these will not replace the old materials in anything near their current state, and that this build only has them overridden to make it easier to preview how they look in existing builds. If the intent is to replace them, Roblox needs to be way more faithful to the old materials, since developers have grown to expect them to look a certain way with respect to patterns and brightness.
As general rules of thumb, Roblox should make sure to do the following when designing these materials. Almost none of the materials currently in the build meant as generic part textures (not materials meant to match smooth terrain) follow all of these rules:
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NEVER force a color onto a material. Pre-existing materials such as corroded metal are obviously the exception. Developers need ambiguous and versatile materials. A second color property on baseparts to adjust material accent-color tint would be acceptable if this is necessary. (My game has blue, purple, and even orange grass since my map is an alien planet. Now it’s all green…)
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Equalize the overall value / tone of the material to match the value / tone of currently existing materials, or offer a material intensity [1] [2] property on baseparts (I’d expect this to raise the darkest color in the texture according to the property value, basically compressing levels). The materials in the build have wildly different brightnesses compared to their original textures which throws off careful contrasts artists have chosen. Also, these materials are extremely visually busy and noisy, reducing intensity like this would help immensely.
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Materials that have tiling features such as wooden planks should be sized to the stud grid so developers can create 1 stud planks for example, or else provide a material scale [1] setting on baseparts. (Currently planks in the new build are roughly 0.8 studs wide. The old planks texture was 1 stud wide, so this change will break careful material usage in builds)
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Materials should maintain roughly the same texture as their original versions, since developers have used them under that appearance, or else should have generic variants that can be used for arbitrary purposes. New materials need to be faithful to old materials. For example, slate in the current build now has aggressive cracks, when previously it was a nice all-purpose rough texture, and has since been used for all kinds of non-stone purposes (e.g. as tree bark in one of the template games even). Additionally, sand is now diagonal instead of directional, which messes up places where developers have used the sand texture relying on its direction.
Also, wood and wood planks look totally different, it’s a bit unappealing to use them together just as it was with the old wood textures, please try to maintain some kind of consistency between alike variants of textures if possible.
Other than these issues, these textures look nice. Hope to see some stylized ones as well. Realism is not the only art style on Roblox, and the new materials on low-poly builds using many straight edges and regular parts look incredibly busy and visually noisy.
The materials meant to match smooth terrain materials on parts are also pretty good, and since they’re new and (should) not override anything, it’s probably okay if they’re less generic. Smooth terrain materials also look great.
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These new textures are fantastic— but they must be optional in some sort of manner.
Certain textures don’t fit well with current builds and by simply just overriding them will cause problems that won’t be able to be fixed unless you’d want to spend hours tweaking the colours and the different textures in order to make them function.
Grass for an example is a fun one. The colour texture seems to be green instead of grey scale causing most grasses before to change into a greenish tint ruining most of my builds which are set in a fantasy theme world.
Slate seems to completely change the texture, making it almost seem like cobblestone instead of the semi smooth texture we’re used to having.
These are just a few examples. There should be a way to opt out of this change and only get the new materials as changes or to just make the newer material textures be a bit more safer in terms of compatibility with games which use the old textures.
Grey scaling the textures would be a single small step towards this conundrum, but of course, texture changes would definitely have to be considered if you want to completely overhaul all these old materials and let it stay recognizable.
Sure, they may be pretty, but jeez- There are definitely some issues.
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I am waiting until release and my disgust also comes from playing with it on my own.
Here are some of my builds before and after:
Some of my builds do go with it but with the ones that I do work commission-wise, this adds up more work for me to future proof everything with materials that in some cases are too dark or just completely changed. Roblox should’ve been more mindful of that.
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I don’t like seeing people quit stuff they might of liked so. Before that, try to make something based around these materials. A big reason why before and after pics made other materials look terrible is because games originally never were built around them which makes other stuff look funky. Some stuff are on the material. Concrete looks a bit worse because it looks too wet, and some materials have pre defined colours which ruined some stuff, and slate looks too smooth which ruined some stuff. If you run into issues like these, just wait until release or when it’s sorted out. Just give it a shot.
I agree with this statement a LOT. I think quitting over an update (or even just hating an update) is not the best way to go about updates (99% of the time.) This is a big example of that. The best way to measure how good an update can/will with updates like this IS NOT to look at the immediate changes, the best way is to see how you can use the new/updated things to modify the experience, maybe even improve it! If you can’t improve it (be critical, but don’t be TOO critical) with the new updates, that’s a genuine reason to complain. Some updates like the dumb and poorly thought out “Uploading Fees” update is a case where you cannot do that, as it is entirely in Roblox’s hands, and they did a bad job on it.
To more critical people’s credit, some of the materials DO look worse. Slate in specific is just bad now, I feel like it’s new role was already filled by cobblestone (which could use some changes, specifically with the height map and blending). Metal and Wood Planks would be better if they were less dark. Many materials would look better without built-in discoloration (old terrain Stone looked terrible because of that). Some terrain textures have odd issues with overlaps. Some part textures have weird lines, which don’t look intentional at all. Rusted metal and fabric look really low res, which is bad.
The complaint of “having to update the builds ourselves to fix this, which is really tedious and obnoxious” is a complaint that I really find doesn’t fit with game development as a whole. Be prepared for it to be tedious, it’s like that for any development platform. Development is a tedious process, you should be prepared for that. I’m used to doing this with scripts.
Try differing some materials, and be more creative! Well slate isn’t looking great, try using other materials instead! Rock is a part material now, so try replacing slate with stone for the time being! An inability to be versatile with materials leads to being a worse builder.
Edit: Yea can roblox not force this please?
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I am sorry that you don’t see it the same way that experienced people actually see it. It is a very valid point from both the worker and employer perspective because someone’s probably going to get paid to try to fix something that could’ve been avoided by talking to the community about it.
I mean, we can’t even connect 2 different parts with wooden planks equipped without needing to utilize unions (oh dear god no!) or meshes cus otherwise it looks like this:
I agree that we can be “more creative” with different materials but there’s the problem - this is PBR materials meaning that those are how the materials should be and they have the roughness, reflection and shine of the materials. The best option that I’ve seen as a substitute for Slate was Salt but it simply feels too soft to be slate. This is why we complain about this!
No one makes fun of us because we complain? We made fun of because we are a “kiddie gameing platform”
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The problem isn’t that we builders aren’t versatile, it’s because we have to change our games and our colours for hours on end to tweak it to be similar to fit our old builds. And not even that- old builds or games can get screwed over because of this.
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Except this isn’t what happens on any other game engine. Imagine if Epic decided out of nowhere that anyone that uses Unreal Engine must make a game that is cel shaded - no more realistic looking games on their watch. And better yet - they go backwards. So not only are new projects required to look that way but Arkham Knight, a game from 2015, gets changed years down the line to a completely new art style because Epic said so.
That’s absurd right? That’s because this doesn’t happen elsewhere. I also recognize game development is tedious, it is my job. My problem with this is that I have to spend development resources on retrofitting old maps to work with this new style that is, presumably, being forced onto me rather than using those development resources to actually improve the game. If anything this looks to be a side grade in the best of cases.
I have literally never met a single person in the games industry who knew anything substantial about the Roblox development community, good or bad. The only thing that is frequently made fun of is Roblox itself, and how limiting the engine is. This situation is only an extension of that.
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Although I am happy to see this update one big thing I would love to see is more low poly textures. Something we can use for our games that gives a cartoony material that’s built in so It doesn’t impact our performance.
Although I love the PBR textures If were planning on supporting all types of games the games that are going for a more cartoony low poly vibe could benefit greatly from some cartoony textured terrain.
I have a game and its mostly white and bright cause I don’t have many decent cartoony materials. I could use some of the PBR textures but I don’t always want to be using those. Some nice cartoony ones could go far
Testing After image
Before Image
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No one makes fun of us because we complain? We made fun of because we are a “kiddie gameing platform”
I don’t see that much anymore. That’s more with Fortnite now. I am going to change the final point to address this, as I think you give a fair point! We still do stand out in a not great way because of it, but you are right that we aren’t made fun of for it. I should have taken that into account and done more research.
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Fair point! I should have mentioned that when I talked about versatility, I was talking about versatility with using new and updated things. I did give examples of ways to update builds accordingly (replace garbage Slate with Stone), but I could have added more examples. I still do think we should try to use the new to fix the old. If a game is old and gets screwed over by this update, yet isn’t still updated by its devs, the game was doomed to begin with, this just adds a nail that can be put in their coffins.
Also yeah, screw the issue of discoloration, Roblox needs to work on that and the new garbage Slate material.
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I personally like the new slate material. Sure its not for PBR but if they end up making a built in cartoony pack then It would look really good for that.
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Epic can’t really do that, since the software supports custom node based tiled materials, making it an unfair comparison to Roblox. (Roblox should add that, that would be a game changer.) Having to change things in a tedious manner is something we should all be used to, since that happens all the time with scripts. (Annoying, but I’m learning to just deal with it.)
I did notice that some shading was really off compared to the old ones. (I can’t be the only one to think sandstone doesn’t shade properly anymore), that’s the most I saw with the tonal difference issue. I do hope they make all materials grayscale, and that they make the parts less dark (WHY IS METAL SO DARK!?! YOU TOO, WOODEN PLANKS!)
I did go on to remove the thing about us being made fun of, that was very wrong and a result of not doing enough research. I will agree with you that that was a stupid point on my part, I’m glad that I was called out for that.
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Ehhh, I can see where you are coming from with that. I personally think it should have been a separate material though, old slate was much more versatile than this new slate. I call it garbage because of it being the material that was changed too much. Honestly, they just need to add node material support.
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We need to keep the current 2013 materials alongside these if this is what will happen with games, atleast until custom materials support is implemented and we can restore them ourselves. Retuning them to match presents completely breaking backwards compatibility. As someone who works on recreating games from around 2014-16, this could be potentially devastating to my work, especially when wanting to run it in an older Roblox rendering environment (don’t ask why).
EDIT: I know this is the very first public beta and things are subject to change, which is why it’s good to get these things in and known about early, even if it only goes as far as undoing the awkward colour clamps on some of the new materials (e.g. grass, wood, wood planks)
EDIT2: Bugs (colour clamping, Plastic being almost completely broken) have been reported to the GitHub repo.
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The new materials look good but after reading alot of replies. There is alot of issues with the new materials.
I just wanna say that the current materials roblox has atm should be archived for old game purposes or other things.
The current materials is what gives roblox “feel” to me. Since I used them for quite a very long time since I started.
The new materials however look more realistic but still needs major changes.
I like both but I perfer the old materials since I got too used to it than the new ones.
If custom materials (not surface appearance) do become a thing on roblox soon. Hopefully we can keep the old materials (and older materials) with this feature
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