^ this, a million. I wouldn’t write off this update because it doesn’t look perfect on existing content - by that metric, dynamic lighting would be Roblox’s worst update ever since it ‘broke’ almost all games when it was first introduced back in the early 2010s.
As long as there’s a good transitional period, Roblox is willing to listen to the community for feedback, and developers have options, there’s no reason to worry.
I want to repeat the points I made in my previous post that this is not simply just a matter of new textures looking kinda meh on old games - these are massive aesthetic changes that Roblox is making for nearly every single game on the platform presumably (because there has been absolutely no mention of flipping it on and off from what I’ve seen, and I cannot think of a single time in the past that Roblox has done that aside from lighting settings and that’s just because phones turn into bombs when overworked).
The state of Roblox in 2010 was very different from how it is now. This isn’t a hobby that they are messing with any longer, this is my business and my livelihood. The idea that Roblox is still willing to go in and completely change the aesthetic of games while we do not have the proper tools for true, tileable, custom materials is ridiculous. The amount of work that will need to go into retrofitting these old maps is really, really stupid and the cost of that lands entirely on developers.
Okay. Here’s my opinion. I feel there’s still lots of work that needs to be done on lots of these, but there are a few I love.
Bricks: They’re fine, but make it so the color isn’t forced, because even when it’s white, it still has a red tint; also, it has a bit of a tiling issue.
Cobblestone: I don’t like the fact that it’s colored by default, I would like a solid color. Also, the specular texture doesn’t seem deep enough.
Concrete: Still suffers from the default color, a bit too shiny, needs a bit more depth.
Corroded Metal: If the rust is fleshed out to have a smoother transition with the metal, it would be good.
Diamond Plate: Good the way it is.
Fabric: Good the way it is. I love the ripple look to it when zooming out.
Foil: Good the way it is.
Forcefield: There’s no change. Good the way it is.
Glass: Good the way it is.
Granite: Suffers from the forced coloration, remove that and it’s perfect.
Grass: Suffers from forced coloration big time. The specular map doesn’t feel deep enough.
Ice: Good the way it is.
Marble: Suffers from the tiling effect, which may or may not be intentional. Other than that, it’s good.
Metal: Suffers forced coloration; other than that the speculars are PERFECT.
Neon: No change. It’s good.
Pebble: It feels like it’s lacking detail. It could use a few more pebbles thrown in there!
Plastic: It suffers weird stretching effects. Keep the original texture.
Slate: It doesn’t look rough enough. Try basing it off actual rough slate in real life. The whole point is the roughness. Better yet, separate the materials into slate and another stone type.
Sand: Not actually that bad. It looks good.
Smooth Plastic: The same, keep it.
Wood: Suffers a discoloration issue, but the texture is perfect.
Wood Planks: Suffers a forced discoloration issue. The texturing looks tiled, but other than those two it
looks good. Speculars check out.
Terrain Textures
Instead of going through all the individual textures, I’ll be focusing on the ones that need work, and the ones that are fine.
Need work:
Slate: Suffers the same issues as the part material.
Grass and Leafy Grass: Too flat of a texture.
Cobblestone: Too flat of a texture.
Bricks: Too flat of a texture.
Pavement: Just needs a texture overhaul in general.
Basalt: Looks too similar to rock.
Perfect the way they are:
Ice: Very shiny and pretty!
Glacier: Again, shiny and pretty!
Asphalt: Looks pretty dang realistic and good compared to the old one.
Sandstone: It basically looks like the old one but more detailed, I like it.
Cracked Lava: I like it, but the only thing you should do is make it actually have a Neon glow.
Salt: Looks like actual salt flats. I like it.
Sand: Could use a bit more lightening, but I do like it.
Mud: Looks nice and detailed!
Ground: Nice and detailed.
The biggest issue is forced coloration, that’s my biggest issue with it.
Good work to whoever made these textures, and feel free to reply with any other ideas may be good.
Good lord, man, you really told them. I actually could not have put it better myself. You’ve hit the nail on the head. Considering the popularity of your game, as well, I have huge respect for you speaking up about this so vocally. It’s helpful to everyone, and I appreciate that.
I totally agree with you. I just hope the forced base coloration doesn’t stay though. People will have to adjust there games to fit the style, but if we give them enough feedback, we can help reduce some of that. They still need to add custom materials though.
I disagree with this.
There is no reason why developers, who don’t even have control over this, should have to go back and edit all of their achievements and progress from literally over a decade to match this new style.
I, for one, do not want to have to tediously edit every single character model, environment, place, and overall experience that I and my group have created, and then re-render all of the characters I rendered to match a style Roblox sees fit, even if it could impact the visual fidelity and feeling of the original game.
This is an absolute disservice and insult to every legacy game. If this isn’t optional, I will never be able to experience those games I made as they were, rather, now I have to experience them as Roblox wants them to be.
That’s why I believe feedback can help reduce that. I do think it’s a good idea to have legacy textures as an option for people to access.
I agree about feedback being a good thing here, as well as for legacy textures to be accessible. However, knowing Roblox, if legacy textures were accessible, it would only be temporary for a transitional period. They’re already removing CSGV1 without properly considering the consequences of doing so, even though there is no harm in keeping it.
Keep in mind, we’re dealing with a corporation here.
Well, the lighting we have still includes voxel lighting. I believe they said they wanted to remove that, but decided to add it back.
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.
They dont want to remove it because they still need it for lower settings.
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 
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.
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:
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…)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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”
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.
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.
