So they don’t want to adapt their game? Partpicker and some lighting changes won’t kill someone.
What is that supposed to mean?
What
You’re so right! Roblox should at least give us cjoice between new and old materials. Even if roblox want to be realistic, it shouldn’t force realism everywhere. I’ll never open studio again, when those materials will be released, because this #### will make me suffer while building.
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they have done this new material thing before
they would deprecate the old materials if they kept them anyways
Thanks Roblox, thanks for ruining old games. Now we can’t use old materials, you guys didn’t even ask for our feedback. You just pushed this update without asking, thanks a lot.
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You are in an extremely small minority group, posts like these come off as shockingly out of touch.
Eventually we all just have to adapt to this change.
A change that way more than half of the community has expressed extreme disapproval of. It’s 2021 and we still don’t have custom materials, yet somehow this is better and more important to push out when virtually no one wants, or asked for it. Roblox is thee only engine in this day and age that does not have basic, bare minimum systems like this. (IP banning is another example, no other platform actively refuses to add a crucial system like this except for Roblox - no other platform has this missing from even its earliest builds in the first place) I’m not sure if I will continue to develop when I’m literally forced to wait 1 - 2 years hoping that a custom material system will be implemented that isn’t the by definition bloatware like the SurfaceAppearance object just so I can correct what is by definition a mistake
We’ve had to adapt to far worse things before.
And we should keep doing this over and over again because…?
This just encourages us to learn more about lighting in order to reach the desired look of a material.
Except the new lighting engine already botched basic ambient colors and partially ruined materials like grass which have extremely high reflectance in comparison to how they behaved in the old engine, looking like a bad GTA V ‘Ultra realism’ mod where it looks like everything just got done getting rained on for 2 weeks straight. Now we have another layer of color distortion that won’t be fixed or improved upon. This isn’t one step back, this is 10 steps back. Would be nice if we were allowed to edit basic settings on materials like their reflectance, we aren’t even allowed to change the FOV of the camera over a certain value without hacks.
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I wanted to give these materials a chance and tried reworking our map to use the new materials. Here are my results, and (hopefully) unbiased criticism.
First issue - Slate
The previous slate material was absolutely perfect for our rocks. It was not too in-your-face and mixed very well with both shadows and light.
Now, the new slate material fits nowhere - our game uses a silver-blue color palette, and while the slate material itself adapts to the color just fine, it is way too distinct from the grass, thus offsetting the balance it previously had.
Now, the alternative I found to this was the Rock material, which looks the most similar to the old Slate material. The issue with the Rock material is that it is way too bright and seems too, for the lack of a better word, detailed - in a bad way.
Here is how it looks:
Even if you try making it lower color, the details on the rock are too much to subtly fit in with the grass (below image has color set to 82, 89, 93 and Brightness at 5).
If I go below a certain color, the rock texture itself looks extremely bad with the darker color.
This is the material I have the biggest issues with. None of the materials and color combinations I can find seem to work properly. Here is how it originally looks for reference:
Second issue - Brick
The brick material, like the rock, does not fade well with shadows at all. Even in a shadow, it looks absurdly bright, and takes the spotlight away from the stairs layer on top of the bricks.
Trying to change colors to something lower does not work either. As mentioned above our game heavily uses a silver-blue color palette, so setting the brick color to a tone of white looks unfitting. This is the best color I could find, but even then the colors are way too bright.
This is not the most pressing issue I have with bricks, though. The issue I have with them is that each individual brick is MUCH bigger, which is why these stairs look weird. Other than that, the bricks look great! They are highly detailed, which is something really nice for our game that takes focus on realism.
A possible fix could be to introduce a variant of the brick material, which has smaller bricks, or tiling sizes for the materials (iirc @PeZsmistic made a feature thread on the matter?)
Third issue - Snow
Our game previously relied on the Sand material with a white color to make snow, and obviously it is better to use the Snow material now. But snow sadly feels a lot like a mix of plastic and the old slate material; even if you set the color of snow to institutional white (255, 255, 255), there is still a big tone of blue. As already mentioned, it also looks like slate:
This is the original look:
As you can see, there is no intense nuance of blue on the “snow” (which is just white sand), and it does not reflect like slate does, but rather it reflects like… sand, lol.
On the mention of sand, we can’t use it either as a replacement for snow, since it has much bigger “waves” that are too in-your-face. A compromise could be some sort of “wavy” or “powder” snow, which holds a better resemblance to sand rather than the new snow.
cc. @Sorcus
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Technically, they did ask in the previous post, but also posted a survey, which just makes it feel even more insulting that we’re being ignored.
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…That’s a good thing, if a material can be used for more than originally intended. You are literally saying that better options for more creativity is a bad thing.
Apparently, we’re all supposed to just sit back and take this and watch all our creations from the past 7 years of this website get overwritten and screwed up by a corporation…
If we had been given proper alternatives to the old materials, maybe, just maybe I could see where you’re coming from. They’ve decided to ship this without that and burn down everything else. Materials are NEVER to serve just one purpose. That’s like looking at the world in black and white. If someone can find another use for something, that should be encouraged. It’s making the most out of something smaller.
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Slate looks more like real slate now. Try using the rock material
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Rock looks way too bad to be used anywhere productive. Look at my post above for an explanation.
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Here’s something that came to my mind and I’ve seen others mention it already as well.
The reason for materials being completely replaced stated by the staff is that it would increase the download size of the client on mobile. Well, considering that you need some really good lighting like Future or at least the specular and diffusion as well as high graphics quality level for these new materials to look alright, it’s missing the point by quite a bit for rather obvious reasons.
Also, if devs were to use workarounds like textures or surfaceappearance, that is going to decrease the performance even further, not to mention that players will have to download the assets anyway every time they join.
The effect on download size can be decreased by only keeping the more distinct legacy materials, since some of them, like Neon, SmoothPlastic, etc weren’t changed much and some of the new materials are seen as an actual upgrade by the majority of the dev community, like the wood.
And in the end, if it’s so critical, there is always the option to only force the new materials on mobile.
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Sad to say but some of the new textures do indeed mess up some of my games.
I’m not a modeller nor map maker, but I spent about 2 months working on my little map for The Spinny Tops, which with the new textures looks hideous to say the least.
I can probably just ‘paint’ most of the textures, but little details I spent making standout (such as pathways) now look too harsh, contrasted or sharp for the mood I was going for.
The leafy grass and sand is the worst for me. I wouldn’t mind if they just added new textures but this will take time in my busy schedule to repair.
( I don’t have time to upload pictures now since I’m back in work o_o! )
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This topic was posted yesterday. They don’t have to respond right away. There’s still a full month till it rolls out. Not trying to be rude, but you can’t just expect answers right away. They should keep both the future textures and the legacy textures. It’ll make both sides happy
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This is exactly what I was thinking - Plastic, SmoothPlastic, Neon, Glass and Forcefield haven’t changed much if at all in these builds and therefore there would be no need to keep the legacy versions of these 5 materials on hand.
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The main issue with all of this is that many Roblox games have a very specific aesthetic built upon legacy materials. All of these new materials go for a distinctly different, true-to-life style.
I remember at one RDC Roblox talked about how they want to allow experiences to have different art styles, like how some will be cartoony, some will be earthy, some will be alien, etc. I don’t remember exactly which RDC this was but I think it was at the same one where mesh skinning and surface appearance got announced, so maybe RDC 2019? 2020?
Now I know this is not unprecedented for the Roblox platform, I was around when the classic wood texture got swapped out for a much more realistic and less cartoony version. I was around when the classic terrain textures all got overhauled and the water material went from a perfect light blue square with a scrolling texture to indicate current, for a much more realistic water rendering with waves, atmospheric influence, specular highlights. I was around when Plastic became all grainy and people got upset, so SmoothPlastic was introduced.
But those changes were many years ago, the community was not nearly as large, and all of the new materials were designed specifically to look good in the ways the old ones were used. This time, the materials are obviously not designed to have “feature parity” of the old materials, which means things need to be changed about a level, and some techniques are no longer applicable.
Want to represent a water surface? Foil no longer works for that. Want to use grass to express leaves on a tree? Some might argue it is passable with the new grass, but it is clearly a very different look. You cannot anymore use Fabric as carpets (which by the way is totally how fabric was originally intended to be used, just look at the strips of discoloration, which you can see in carpeted floors IRL). Sand no longer works for wallpapers inside houses. Bricks went from a nice unobtrusive structural material that was the go-to for any building, to an extremely contrasty and bold material that is a lot harder to work with. Good luck using bricks on anything that isn’t literally a brick and mortar structure that follows orthogonal patterns and a 1 stud scaling. The misaligned mortar lines look hideous.
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I was trying to make the point to @FrostEspresso that they have asked for our feedback before but with this announcement that it was being ignored, not that we expected an immediate response.
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I have quite mixed feelings about this, But I sure love to see it, I can see a lot of improvements compared to the last build and I am happy to see it 
Advantages:
- First, The textures are nice looking and have more Pbr effect which is perfect for the new future lighting.
- There are a lot more textures and variety to use which is great and offers a wide range of use cases to choose from.
-
Wood has finally a proper alignment and looks better than ever and the texture is more realistic to what they are called.
Here are my favorite ones:
Disadvantages:
- The forced update seems not that great to hear, I would like to see at least some of the old ones being additional or optional such as the old Cobblestone.
- The realistic aspect of the textures won’t match other builds that don’t target the realism such as the Cartoony style and more…
- The improvement that I’ve seen seems more like they are changing the whole textures rather than improving them, It is great but at the same time, it can change a lot of aspects of the game but also the use-cases we are using it for.
- Builders build their games based on the old ones, and the fact that the textures got completely changed and as a result, it may not look as expected but I believe it won’t cause too much harm, at least for me, nothing much in my opinion
- Builders build their games based on the old ones, and the fact that the textures got completely changed and as a result, it may not look as expected but I believe it won’t cause too much harm, at least for me, nothing much in my opinion
So… in the end, I cannot say it is a bad update, the people behind this took a lot of effort to make it and I am satisfied with the results, to be honest.
Plus…
I would love to see that, This is really great, and great job to all of you!
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SurfaceAppearance is “by definition bloatware” ??? what
also, do you not realize that the old materials looking strangely reflective when using the new image based lighting etc was a symptom of how old they were? the new ones have roughness values more tuned to their real life counterparts.
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Again, I urge you to consider all of the games that no longer get updated being permanently ruined, visually.
There is no way for those games to be adapted unless someone remakes them from the ground up, similar to The Undead Coming.
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I don’t believe those are footsteps. I think they are supposed to be more like sand dunes.