Really quick: it is absolutely insane that Roblox can just destroy the aesthetic of existing games on the platform through pushing changes like this. This would be completely unacceptable in any other modern game engine and to be quite frank it makes me extremely uncomfortable as a developer. The fact that this is even happening when we do not have the tools to fix it ourselves is ridiculous as well (though I don’t think it should be on developers to fix something that wasn’t broken to begin with)!
In my game Bad Business, we have a ton of maps that largely depend on a mix between built-in materials and smooth terrain. The reason we use built-in materials so much is because it saves significantly on development costs; many of the live materials are ambiguous enough that they can be reused effectively in many different situations, something this update is looking to take away completely.
Here are some examples of before and after images, comparing the live version of our game to the beta build. Not a single existing map in Bad Business looks better with the new materials.
This is our map Runoff, which uses a lot of concrete to create an futuristic, industrial feeling. As you can see, our concrete slab texture immediately looks out of place with the new concrete, which brings up a huge complaint that these new materials drastically change the actual color of the bricks in-game. Again, it should not be the developer’s responsibility to fix something that wasn’t broken to begin with, but if this update were to get pushed in the state its in currently, we would have to spend time going through every map, making sure every one of our textures fits in because of the color changes. Not to mention the new coloring makes this map look extremely drab, which is something that was narrowly avoided originally through smart usages of lighter grays and green accents as well.
Here is our map Area 51, which utilizes a lot more smooth terrain than some of our other maps. As you can see, the smooth terrain materials almost seem lighter in comparison to their live counterparts, an opposite effect from the part materials. This mismatch provides really weird aesthetic inconsistencies between objects, basically smashing to pieces all the work we put into figuring out how to best match up parts and built-in materials with smooth terrain. But hey, at least that sand looks nicer!
Here’s another set of screenshots from that same map, this time in the tunnels. These are massive visual discrepancies and completely robs this area of the mood we were originally envisioning.
This map is Courtyard. This map uses a lot of grass, but because of gameplay factors we do not have the entire map filled with actual grass, so in the past we used leafy grass in order to achieve the desired effect of having patches of overgrown grass mixed in to a larger landscape. This is no longer viable at all - leafy grass now is a distinctly different texture to regular grass and will have to be completely repainted over. Our cobblestone pathways also no longer look like they are overgrown at all - instead they stick out a ton. We previously consciously used terrain smoothing to help add variety to the ground surface (that’s why we even chose to use smooth terrain for our maps in the first place actually) but now that also has been taken away from us.
Here’s a case where the ambiguity of previous materials, when used to our advantage, looked pretty alright in some situations, like using the grass material for tree leaves. Was this perfect? No. Does it look a whole lot worse now? Most definitely. This is exactly the situation where we wanted to save money by just using Roblox materials, and yet that doesn’t seem to be valid any longer. This also, yet again, shows that the new materials are completely different colors from before.
I feel like I could go on and on, because nearly every map in my game suddenly has to be changed drastically to fit the new style that Roblox sees fit for us, not what we see fit for us. This will cost us a lot of time and it will cost us a lot of money, and there is absolutely no good reason for it. If you want to empower us to make better looking games, give us the tools to do so if we want to, don’t force us into an aesthetic that doesn’t fit with what we’ve been developing for 2 years.
It used to be layered like real sandstone rock. Even your photo in the main post looks like this:
Corroded Metal is fantastic now and actually shows the base color! Wood is a beautiful look between old wood and original wood from yeeeears ago. I could go on and on.
not looking forward to how this goes down