This is a very significate update in the community that everyone has been waiting. I love that Roblox is using a modern style of materials to express and it looks pretty cool in all honesty, but some older player of course get upset with old stuff from Roblox been taken away or replaced but I would asssume these new materials will help so many devs that most of you might not know but yeah would love to see how y’all are going about these new materials
EDIT - This is just something for older player to look out lol (picture was taken by my guy @Rocky28447 )
It’s almost as if none of the feedback of the mass butchering of builds from the previous announcement thread was ever regarded. Funny how that works. I’m absolutely up for extended and custom materials but I don’t see the point in changing the look of current materials without checking in if those materials are used in special ways. That was just a solution looking for a nonexistent problem.
Nice.
EDIT: In some respects, I yield, it’s better than the last build especially with things suched as forced colouring gone. Doesn’t mean I like it though. My team’s project with the textures enabled looks a little filthy. Pictures below taken by @TeamSwordphin.
For you, not for us. This is gonna mess up all our games now! Thanks a lot! Almost like you didn’t ask for our feedback. Way to throw that out the window!
Sure, the new materials will be great for some people. This can’t be the case for everyone though. A lot of developers have already future proofed their games with the looks of the old materials, and a force of old to new seems too corrupt. Shouldn’t there at least be an alternative way of keeping old materials once it’s fully released? This just seems like it’s going to mess with a lot of people’s development progress.
I’m happy to see this gearing up for release. Last build I saw I was comfortable with the state of most textures and they had minimal impact on my game. I will update this post when I’ve taken a closer look at the build because there were some things I was still concerned about. Keeping the old materials is needlessly cluttering if the new ones are done right.
Also, will there be a property set in studio of default, enabled, and disabled? We require this pattern of properties to allow us to disable this in our games so we can organize an update to change materials that no longer work for where they’re used. This would also let us hold back until mobile receives the changes too if the differences are too big.
I’ve taken a look at the build and have some concerns.
I was expecting these egregious tiling artifacts to have been addressed in the build intended for release, but you can see very clearly that almost every natural material has extremely visible tiling, especially grass which is unacceptable because grass is fundamentally intended to cover large flat areas. Didn’t these natural textures have a shader or effect applied to mitigate tiling issues? I do not see patterns in the old grass, marble, concrete, etc. textures. Will this be fixed?
Also still don’t like the grass texture. It looks flattened, and is much more visibly directional; it creates seams between parts so much worse now, which is an unsightly problem for games that have caves and holes in the ground, like mine.
Similar to how sand used to have no detail in low-light, concrete also has no detail in low-light and indoor conditions, which makes it look extremely smooth and awkward. There should be some detail pressed into the albedo texture for concrete just like how it was done for the waves in the sand texture.
It is impossible to match the leafygrass material to the terrain material when it has been recolored. Please implement this feature request, because it would also improve reusability of materials like corroded metal as well, and allow Roblox to make much more creative materials.
While I would far prefer this just being a simple replacement, I think given that a lot of our concerns are not being addressed here with respect to material likeness being preserved (sand depth, granite color, grass style, brick size, etc.), keeping old in addition to new and both being usable in parallel is appropriate.
I do not think the reasoning “Application download times would also be significantly increased, especially as we expand the material library” makes sense because Roblox is already going to be increasing the material library significantly anyway. Which makes these old materials ultimately like a drop in the bucket, especially when they can be compressed in bulk. I download 10x the data Roblox uses for materials on twitter in 5 minutes. If someone can’t download the application on their internet connection, they probably cannot play Roblox very well. Further, to my knowledge textures in engine are only loaded into memory when they’re used, which puts the onus on the developer to be responsible.
The other reasoning about library assets is also moot if all materials remain usable at the same time.
OLD RESPONSE: This is absolutely disappointing. An overwhelming amount of users have asked for this not to be forced on us, and yet this feedback has been thrown away as if nobody said it. Completely disappointed. Please listen to the developers before rolling out a change such as this. We are all going to have to re-work old games, and some might need to be completely re-done.
Personally, I am worried about other games. I personally have been optimizing my games already with the previous builds. I think we are lucky of getting a month to change our games. Usually Roblox doesn’t do these kinds of things. Unfortunately, Roblox needs to modernize. Yes, it will be hard to get used to it, but in the end, we will think we are over-reacting about a month after this is done rolling out.
My game uses wood and sand for the most of the surfaces, but now I have to rethink it again since, for example, sand does not fit as a back surface for the task board I have shown. Same thing with the sheathe and capes. I could accept this as a variation for the materials that you could pick to swap, but not as a complete overhaul.
While I’m happy that there are new materials, my game doesn’t look as good as it did with the old textures. Now I probably have to rebuild it from the ground up so it looks at least somewhat better.
If possible could you go further in-depth about this. So that way we can understand why, and hopefully help get the bigger picture for some. Thanks in advance.
You were warned by the community not to try and push this without a compatibility mode, or some way to use the old materials. It is going to destroy countless old games with their previous aesthetic and absolutely ruin them beyond recognition. HUNDREDS of talented developers took your survey to provide you with the feedback YOU requested, yet it was clearly ignored despite the obvious night and day difference between the people who wanted them kept and the people who wanted them replaced.
This is going to ruin how sand looks for clothing, how brick looked on older games, how literally everything everyone has worked on for over the past 10 years has looked.
I am convinced because of this update, there are going to be a fair few developers, potentially myself included, quitting development until this is changed. It irreversibly ruins the atmosphere and design of games which can no longer be updated.
Without a shadow of a doubt, all of the backlash from this update will be the fault of the people at HQ choosing not to listen to their community. I’m not trying to be aggressive, here, but you reap what you sow.
Edit:
No. You cannot “modify your content to maintain your desired aesthetic”. You have literally ruined the opportunity TO MAINTAIN that aesthetic in its entirety. I have gone through the preview builds and attempted to do this, there is no “alternative solution” here. None of the materials improve any of my builds, and there are no other materials that will fill the same role adequately. I am literally forced to wait for custom materials now, or convert every single build I have ever created into meshparts, then reimport the entirety of the original material library, and add them as surfaceappearances.
Even then, importing everything as a meshpart would break a good chunk of scripts I utilize. This is nothing more than a kick in the teeth.
as great as it is to get high quality materials, some of these feel like they still need some tweeking.
for example in the new sand texture there is way too much variation in “height”
as well as this, where the texture repeats has become extremely noticeable.
notice how the old textures are much more subtle and less in your face about what the texture is. I understand that many builds and styles will benefit from this change, i think these textures need some more time to be finalised, mostly to fix the repeating texture problem.
The problem is that it’s not my intention to make it look like cork. I love it the way it is because currently the sand is the superior material and fits for a variety of assets: leather assets, cloth assets, hair, food with some grain on it and etc. I don’t want cork instead of what I currently have as it pushes my assets further away from what it is meant to be.
(picture was taken by my guy @Rocky28447 ) 
