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.
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.
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.
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
Additionally, LeafyGrass was changed to be highly contrasting against its leafless counterpart, which makes games that used it to remove vegetation look silly.
If this stays as-is, please ensure that terrain vegetation control is released first.
If no changes are made to these materials before release, please make them optional (i.e. via a Lighting.LegacyMaterials property, enabled by default on old places) so older games aren’t screwed over by these changes.
it’s a fair comparison because that degree of customizability should be a priority for game development platforms. Doesn’t matter that Unreal uses a different means to accomplish materials, it’s that they have the tools to avoid the exact predicament we’re facing now. They shouldn’t be pushing an update that does such a degree of damage to work developed in the old style, especially when we’ve always lacked the tooling for greater visual customization. This will affect Every Game On The Platform.
Tedious to set up? Sure. I can get behind that sentiment. But tedious for no reason? Nah that’s awful. Last time I checked other game engines/platforms don’t ship big visual changes that can destroy the appearance of your project without any way to revert it.
For a lot of developers on Roblox this isn’t just a hobby, it’s a job. Time spent working on something quite literally costs money and having to cover the costs of what might be hundreds of hours fixing mistakes they didn’t make is a huge loss. Hundreds of hours is by no means an exaggeration too:
Can a color change fix it? Quick and easy.
Can I even get the same color as before? Make a new texture per color I can’t get, not quick
Did the texture sizing change / direction change? Edits to the build, not quick, potentially needs new textures to be made which is again, not quick
Does the new material even look the same? Remake the texture, deal with color variation, not quick
This process for every part, every mesh, every model, and every bit of terrain in my game. Cherry picking my example but in my current project that’s north of half a million parts, an attire color palate that’ll need updating, our day night lighting cycles will need to be adjusted, and we’ll probably need to hire texturing artists to create and iterate on new materials to replace the old ones. On top of this we’ll have to pray that all these new textures even load in for people in the first place and that there won’t be performance implications from all these changes.
The complaints are warranted. There is real consequence to making changes like this and I for one am not looking forwards to the direct cost that’ll come from fixing it, the delays to our timeline because we’ll need to fix a directly visible player facing issue we didn’t create, and the waves of complaints we’ll get from our community until it’s fixed.
I really hope this preview build was super super early along and further iterations will have better parity with the current materials. This is far from an upgrade for me, my team, and our game. While some of these look great, others really really ruin things.
Our white brick light house is now red
All of our grass is green. Dead grass? Green. All the color variants of green grass no longer look as varied
Our old slate rocks that looked pretty rocky now look like low poly blobs textured with dry lake bed chunks.
All the metal in our game has been scratched up
All of our light colored wood is now dark wood
All out fabric is the wrong direction
All our wood plank parts no longer line up with the material textures
All our brick material parts have the same problem as our wood plank parts
Just done it. Still nothing new. I’ve deleted it and downloaded it again and then extracted it. I’m definitely opening the Beta one and not the normal one.
