Yesterday the Mad City team and I spent the entire day working on terrain and material adjustments to make it work. We didn’t have a problem with the majority of the materials besides these aspects.
The grass is off-putting and had no “discoloration”. It didn’t look like real grass at all. It was like a solid color.
Leafy grass is completely unusable in the way it was used for its previous version. Most people on Roblox used leafy grass to “cut” the grass where they didn’t want decoration. Because the texture is so large and different, it forces developers to find hacky ways around “cutting the grass”. If this texture is going to be used, there needs to be a version of grass with no decoration and a version with decoration to allow developers to format builds correctly.
There is no good stone texture compared to the old slate. The new slate looks more like the old cobblestone and it makes it difficult to create things like caves with parts. We ended up using the “Snow” texture because it was the closest thing to the old slate.
The sand texture had too much depth and it was too large.
The mud texture looks too plastic-like.
These were the major issues we came across. Besides this, we enjoyed the textures a large amount. If these issues get fixed we’d be happy to use them in our game.
Some materials have improved significantly from this build, however, it appears to have degraded the general art style of some games. It’s become such the case with my game Steam Era where Brick is sharper to the point where it looks cartoony and Pebble has lost its use for anything other than pebble and coal in this game’s case.
The charm with the current materials is that we can utilize them for things other than the material itself (e.g. sand for clothing and furniture, and pebble for ballast in this case), whereas new materials have lost this as the textures make them more limited to their specific material.
I accept that we’ll have to get used to these materials over time (like with many forced changes over the years), but some games may become irreversibly damaged by this update visually. Whilst not an easy task by the team, delighted to know that consideration has been made to make this change optional!
To address some things, I feel like builders need to start becoming more professional and start using custom materials now that custom PBRs are possible. As ROBLOX becomes bigger and more pronounced in the game industry, I feel as if developers on ROBLOX need to become more knowledgeable in texturing to keep growing ROBLOX all together to create bigger and more industry standard games.
To note, if you would like to keep using the old materials. You can just get the original files inside of AppData\Local\Roblox Studio\PlatformContent\pc\textures. And then use SurfaceAppearance
and a loop to just go through every part in the game, check their material and create a surfaceAppearance depending on the material, it’s not hard.
Thank you for listening to our overwhelming feedback, it is greatly appreciated. I want to make it clear for people who may not understand why this update was a problem; there is no problem with the new materials, but not giving developers the option to use the old ones is a terrible idea for the well being of Roblox.
I also have a suggestion for Roblox, and it is to listen to feedback BEFORE it gets this bad. It is absolutely ridiculous that it took this long for this response to come. Based on the feedback you have gotten almost right away, you should have known within 48 hours to withhold this change. Please take this as a cautionary tale about how you shouldn’t push updates.
Not happy a single bit, actually I’m currently upset, our players are waiting desperately for me to finally drop my long-awaiting project, we were excited to launch it in July because it runs on the new materials… HOWEVER, this happened which is sooo annoying to deal with.
I probably now have to spend time moving back and learning how to make my map look good with old Robox materials. I wish they just changed it without feedback at this point, I love the feedback, but eventually, everyone would’ve gotten used to it, but now people who were waiting to get these out to their games are now upset, what I meant by not everyone can be happy.
Why not make it a BETA feature until you come up with a decision about how to also allow old materials to stay on the platform…
Find me a good color for this basalt and I’ll gladly use it over slate. Other than that, it is genuinely getting annoying over how you are only talking about your game; yes, I agree, basalt looks great in some cases, but there are absolutely no replacements for the old Slate materials - rock looks way too detailed even though it’s supposed to be a better slate, and basalt takes the whole stage from grass, and the overall environment. You’re supposed to look around your environment, not the stone.
What’s funny is how snow is a better replacement for the old Slate than basalt, rock and slate…
Sandstone and limestone can make acceptable alternatives if you tweak the color properly. The detail density on sandstone is probably the closest to slate.
I definitely wouldn’t say that sandstone is closest to old slate in terms of actual texture, but it does fit decently enough with the grass - better than the rock, at least.
Incredible. Although there are a couple problems regarding the way Roblox renders SurfaceAppearance PBR compared to Default Material PBR.
With EnvironmentalSpecularScale set to 1, SurfaceAppearance reflects the skybox based on how metallic an object is through Metalness and Roughness maps. Default Material PBR on the other hand, seems to be set to a locked value for Metalness per material. I attempted to remake the Diamond Plate texture and matched it pretty closely and noticed that the specular was similar, but the amount of skybox was reflected on the texture was much more noticeable on the SurfaceAppearance. Maybe I just made it too metallic, although I don’t believe that’s the case.
Anti-Aliasing is also a problem. The texture I made had terrible aliasing, while the edges of the default Diamond Plate were sharp and clean. I remember seeing someone claim they were able to get anti-aliasing on standard textures, but not SurfaceAppearance PBR.
Sorry if this makes little sense. I just want to get this over with.
I got an idea on how we can keep the old textures that could work for everyone here hopefully… So first of all keep the old textures on roblox studio by default, but don’t keep them on the roblox client, and so whenever you join a experience that uses some of the old textures, they will be downloaded much like decals and stuff like that, but instead of downloading every single old texture, the experience should download only the textures that are being used. For example if a experience uses the old grass and sand textures in the map, then only those two textures will be downloaded for the experience. Hopefully this should not make roblox have “Increased download times” or make it “Waste tons of resources”, thought sure, this will make roblox experiences take a bit longer to load but come on, its not like people are gonna notice a one second (or even 1/8 of a second, or less) increased experience load times, plus this bonus loading time will most likely diminish in the future as newer experiences will most likely only use the new textures.
I’m kinda sure these load times might be lower on mobile devices, as the current textures on mobile are like half the resolution of PC textures, however with my idea i have no idea if there will be a check for mobile devices to download the lower resolution ones.
YESSSSSS! Thank you. I am so relieved to hear that you guys listened. Now, let me propose my solution:
Inside the materials tab, have 2 sets of each material from before this update. If that sounds complicated, let me expalin. One material could be named Grass and the other could be named Grass Legacy. Same thing for materials like slate and sand.
Slate, Slate Legacy
Sand, Sand Legacy
The list would keep on going.
(Edited my post since my old solution didn’t allow the mixing of materials. This solution I thought of would probably be better.)
