New Terrain and Parts Built-In Materials - Release Build

We shouldn’t have to go through our games to fix something Roblox broke unless there is significant benefit for them doing such (i.e. FilteringEnabled)

I understand your frustration and thank you for your complement, worked for a good 2 weeks to reach the final product, I will never forget how annoying it was to change it all up. At one point all the glass materials were plain!! I had 100’s of lanterns in the game!!.. pain. True pain.

I wish they had that option too, I’ll miss some of the old materials, but that’s just how they want to keep the platform, so I understand. This although isn’t good news for old games, because some developers quit Roblox and now that this is coming out, their game might look a bit funky! :grimacing:

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Like I said… we tried, and it’s not that I don’t want to believe the outcome will be nicer at the end, but I mean…

Do I even really need to say anything more? I’ve tried every material in the catalog of the new build, and there’s no good alternatives for sand. But here, the old sand looks undeniably better in every regard. What am I supposed to do to fix my builds now? Am I just supposed to throw out 6 years of work? (I did not spend 6 years on this model, but I have spent 6 years making hundreds of models and places.)

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You got this, I’m rooting for you! It’ll look really good once It’s done, trust the process, I’ve experienced it!

For one, 10 seconds added to download time isn’t going to burden anybody. We already get updates all the time. Next, some of these materials just don’t look good for things, and some don’t have any substitutes. The new brick material doesn’t have any substitutes. The new grass doesn’t have any either. I don’t see any real reasons the old materials can’t stay. They’ve been here for years, what is wrong with keeping them now?

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Alright poll time:

What do you think Roblox should do?
  • Keep both sets of new and old materials
  • Go ahead and replace the old materials with the new
  • Scrap the new materials altogether

0 voters

In the event that Roblox cannot bring both sets of materials, what should Roblox do?
  • Go ahead and replace the old materials with the new
  • Scrap the new materials altogether
  • Integrate certain old materials into the new set of materials

0 voters

Hmm… One thing I’m realizing we didn’t account for very much so far is the player side of things, those who simply boot up Roblox and click a game. We here talking are all developers to some extent, but most people are not, and I think Roblox considers this change with them in mind more than us.

The player perspective will just be that suddenly, Roblox will look better, although there would be a rough transition time, and old games would look weird. With that perspective the pros obviously outweighs the cons.

Now kinda feels to me like we’re seen as some kinda acceptable casualty in that story…

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I 150% understand your frustrations, I’m really sorry you have to go through this my friend. I mean I’m not Roblox, I was just a tiny bit annoyed that majority of this comment section did not thank them for their hard work on these new materials… but I for sure understand you. I know this may seem annoying to you. I mean there is nothing we can do, they’ve made the decision no matter how many times we yell or whine, they’ll still do what they want. Try concrete, see if you like that. If not, try to make a custom texture in Blender, I’m sure it can look really nice!

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Something I forgot to mention, but there’s also an entirely different version called Global Rails: Classic, obviously being the original. Not only would I have to change everything for the remastered map and the updated trains, but also the classic map and trains because it is still a supported title. If I wanted to go the extra mile, I could also update all of the archived versions that lead up to this, which consists of at least ten completely different games.

Sorry for replying so much, this is just extremely frustrating.

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Its sand, not cloth. Try texturing your clothing.

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Do not apologize, we are just having a nice conversation.
I understand your frustration, you don’t have to do everything in one day, spend like every few hours a day and by the end of June or mid-June, you’ll be ready!

The Blender solution would work if parts and unions supported custom materials, but they don’t, and currently SurfaceAppearance is unoptimized.

Like I said, we can try and do something about this right now. The OP of this post said that he is relaying all of the feedback back to staff, and with how badly this has blown up in Roblox’s face I’d say we may actually have a chance at some form of middle ground here. It’s better not to give up hope on it, especially since people are currently trying to mod the old materials back in due to their desire for them.

It’s a CSG model. There’s no meshparts used except for the hat and chain. Texturing it would make it difficult to work with due to the fact that it is planned to have outfit toggles, adding six texture instances per piece of clothing would bog down performance a bit, and it would also look bad from a distance.

Believe me, I get what you’re saying, but it’s not a viable solution in this case.

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Actually, the new textures folder occupies some 115 MB, and the old is still pretty large. Also, terrain exists.

In total, it would go from 115 → 250, a large change for a small toggle.

I already said this ^^^ in an earlier post.

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I appreciate you’re trying to keep an upbeat and positive tone here, and the new materials can be used in amazing ways as we’ve seen.

However, I do think that it it fundamental for you to realise that nobody is going to be happy with this until we can keep the old materials. Why? Because we don’t want all of our work ruined and redesigned without consent.

Roblox claim they can’t support both due to file size, but the size of the material texture folders in themselves are tiny, teeny tiny, less than half a gigabyte. This feels like a lazy and cooked up excuse that they came up with purely to try and stave off waves of criticism, but it’s clearly failed.

I love some of the new materials and would be quite happy to use them in new work, but if I had to choose between keeping the old ones only, or adding the new ones only, I would go for the former every time. It is not worth ruining 8 years of hard work when no other platform would ever, ever, redesign all of their content and all of their developers’ content without permission for no good reason.

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If that’s the case, then keep at it. I hope you all get what you asked for. Really sorry you are going through this once again!

they can’t keep the new materials for many good reasons

Assuming you mean the old materials, there isn’t a single good reason not to keep them.

A toggle mode is not needed, the textures can simply be imported into the new system. This would take at the most a day for Roblox to do. The download time/client size excuse is comically bad; Sorcus stated that new materials will continue to be added. We’re also not asking for each and every single old material including the ones for terrain in particular to be kept, just ones such as slate, grass, woodplanks, granite, sand, etc… But in reality even the majority of the old terrain materials should be kept as I stated before, the newer ones are not superior in any shape or form. Dirt is supposed to be dirt, not wet mud. This ultra wet texture trend that you’re not permitted to fix is seen nowhere else except Roblox and is a very large eyesore. I’ve said it once and I’ll said it again, custom materials would’ve been welcomed with open arms over something like this that came out of nowhere and has done nothing to improve anything. We’re having something forced on us we cannot fix in any capacity. More than half of the community has nothing but contempt for this ‘upgrade’ The only real good thing that can be picked out of this is the metal simulation. And that is almost a con in itself; this is another case of new tech being rushed and utilized so poorly that the older is far more superior. It’s not worth the performance decrease for a slightly increased option choice and some fancy surface appearances.

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I appreciate your understanding. Not a lot of the people here supporting the new materials have been very concerned about other people’s problems with it, so this is a refreshing change.

Not a toggle, though. Both could be used simultaneously and that’d fix a lot of the problems. Even if it’s a big jump the file itself is not very big by any means.

Is this an out of season April’s Fool joke?

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Hi there,
Yes, I totally a 150% understand your frustrations and such, as I’ve said in previous posts, I was also not happy at first, but when I redid my entire map I spent a good week studying then redid my map 4 times, and it’s not a small map. :grimacing: 45min of real time walking around it without spiriting. But yeah, I get it, I’ve been through it too. I actually had to fix Glass again, they fixed glass so now all my lanterns look neon with no glass covering.

I hope they give you what you asked for and everybody.

:purple_heart: Always here to support and listen to what people have to say, I for sure understand you!