Can’t we keep the old materials? I don’t really see a reason to remove the old ones other than “we want to make our platform more user friendly and up to date”.
Like honestly, we have the ability to add any number of materials, so why remove the old ones? Just have a big list of them, and that way, the older games will not be ruined by these materials.
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I don’t know if it would be user unfriendly to kids or complicated.
But i wonder if a work around, would be having the option to download and install texture packs uploaded to the site, similar to taking free models. For certain games, and the roblox client can see if the texture pack corresponds to the game id. And preload the games unique materials instead of the default ones, based on the gameid.
An example is the steam workshop for something like garrys mod.
It would be no different than uploading a specific file type to roblox site that accepts only pngs or something, in a package.
Three words.
Legacy. Option. Please.
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Keeping the legacy would overcomplicate things.
Yes.
believe it or not, it is usually a lot more useful to have 12 textures that can look like a lot of things rather than 50 textures that each look like 1 thing.
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A lot of it will come down to how its stored; many people don’t have the memory to store thousands of objects (especially those on mobile devices), meaning there would need to be limits to make it viable - and reloading textures on the go, as needed, will cause visual hits.
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After looking through these materials in all of my games throughout the years, I have some thoughts. I mean no offense, this is some honest but critical constructive criticism.
Most Importantly:
You are asking us to revamp years, months, and days of work for this change. You are also saying there’s a system in the works for more material control. A system that suggests it could be leveraged to make custom materials and therefore LEGACY materials.
We know you’ve put a lot of love and effort into this rework, but rushing it out destructively before giving us finer control is incredibly disrespectful. We can wait a little longer for that custom variant system. Most of us would prefer it if you did.
I personally have ~60 active places within universes that are all unique individual worlds. Users engage in these places constantly (~1M MAU this past month). Polishing the materials in all of these places will take me months. I don’t develop on Roblox as a full-time career. This is not sustainable.
I suggest: release the brand new materials without changing the old, work on the custom variant system, release that, redo some of the lackluster replacement materials, then replace the default materials while offering opt-in legacy materials.
The introduction of new materials does not fulfill use cases that we were using old materials for
Fabric looks like yarn, it used to look like carpets. All carpets now look awful. There is no alternative.
There are plenty of other use cases similar to this listed in the thread. I argue fabric’s use case is not using it improperly. It looked like carpet. It literally was carpet. It is no longer carpet.
If the goal is to make the platform more realistic, this is not the current material iteration you want to force
The overwhelming majority of materials look incredibly unrealistic and cartoony without excessive modification. I’m all for cartoony, but if this’ll change in the future, this’ll be yet another massive undertaking for developers.
Most of the materials are visually worse compared to what they are replacing (bricks, grass, diamond plate, sand, cobble, and fabric to name a few)
My bushes now look like blocks of slate sitting in a planter above hemp grass next to cobblestone ruins.
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Yeah. I guess there are a lot of contradictions.
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Just think about how many builds will be practically ruined by these changes, if the creator does not intend to keep it up to date all of the time.
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I haven’t seen the update for my games yet, but part of me won’t mind it, and the other part of me will.
The good part of the old materials was that you can use them for different things. You could use sand as a curtain or nice floor. Maybe you wanted to use pebbles for dirt, or maybe use granite for a mythical dark world or whatever. You could do anything with the materials, and they’d all look really good!
But with these new materials, they really only look good for their desired purpose. Sand now only looks good as sand. Pebbles are only good for crumbs of rocks and not dirt and granite is more for kitchen tabletops.
This is indeed a huge change and we have, I believe, less than 2 weeks to make it work for all of our games. Oh boy…
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i would assume that the memory usage would only be dependent on how many unique materials are used in a scene, custom or not.
I often spend a lot of time fine tuning colors and materials to make the correct look on my weapons/builds but now all of that work will have to be done again.
This is great, but not for everyone/every build. I think most would agree that it should be 100% optional.
I’m not entirely sure; and I could be totally wrong because it was mostly just a guess. I’ve taken some classes in networking/engineering for my degree and that’s my best guess around the issues behind it without seeing it myself.
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This! Thank you! This really encapsulates what I’ve been trying to say. I’ve got literally zero problem waiting for this because even if it will be a lot of work, I can figure it out somehow. Waiting is the smartest choice for the entire community right here. It could even give them time to refine the new materials a bit more as a bonus.
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I don’t understand why Roblox cant add the old textures with the new ones. Its not a big file size increase. Lets assume that you have an internet connection speed of 42.86 Mbps, the average in the United States.
The old textures only add an extra 8 seconds to download time in that case. The original post is most likely referring to mobile versions of Roblox, so if we want less download size, just lower the quality of textures on the mobile app.
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I have some stuff to say about this update. There is alot of reasons why this is not a good idea, so many games have been built apon the distinct style that is roblox that making such a fundamental change will ruin just about every game on roblox. Not all game devs have the time to redo hundreds of builds because there overlords at roblox wanted to change everything. I’m fine with updating some textures like wood and wood planks as they actually look surprisingly good but there are alot of textures that just don’t work. The thing that makes alot of the old textures work is they are versatile. sand looks like sand but also looks like a cloth like material, grass looks like grass but also works as leaves, things like that. I’m not saying all the new textures are bad on there own, they just don’t make good replacements for the old textures.
Another issue I have seen is the style of the textures, some textures look stylized while others look more realistic. That makes no sense to me as the current textures all have a similar style that works really well.
Something as important as making the textures have the same style should not be taken lightly. It makes things look out of place and weird.
This is a game I’m working on with a few people and I think I speak for all the devs in our game this update is not a good idea.
Here we have a room with a bed simple right? It is clear that it is a wooden bed with a grey cover.
With the new textures you can see the wood actually looks nice but the grey cover on the bed is completely different. It looks like someone just got done jumping on the bed…
Here we have another room with a couch and some tables
And with the new textures the couch and rug look off… the coloring of the fabric material is way different and the scale of the material looks too large to me.
Here we have a worn down sci-fi looking lab
With the new textures the metal looks like it has no texture at all the the diamond plating looks like it is made out of plastic, the corroded metal is also not as subtle making it hard to even look at.
Here I have a living room with a couch and a desert wasteland outside
With the new textures the couch looks lumpy and the carpet looks weird. the outside looks a bit off as well i just can’t tell why though.
as I said before I don’t hate the all the new textures… some of them are actually pretty nice but they are just not good replacements for the old textures. Alot of what made the old textures nice is all the uses people found for them… These new textures just… lack that.
If anything this should be and option in game settings to use the new or old textures. Even that is a lame solution though. You should be able to create your own part and terrain materials anyways. I would add a way to create and download(like though the tool box) different materials. then you could just have these materials on the tool box for anyone who wants them.
anyways that concludes my ted talk, just whatever you do please don’t force this update.
Sincerely, Every dev on this platform.
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It adds complication other than download size. When Roblox adds new materials going forward, as they have made clear they will do, what happens if you have a scene with objects assigned to the Paper material and switch to the legacy material mode? What about previews of objects for toolbox or an asset marketplace which look different when added to a proejct using legacy materials? etc.
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We don’t want a toggle. We want to be able to use them side by side.
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