The new materials don’t fill the roles that the past materials filled. That’s the main issue here, slates no longer rough but is now smooth and granite is no longer smooth but now rough.
You should take a look at what roles the past materials for filled and either create new materials to for fill these old roles. Or modify/remake materials to for fill them again.
Is there any chance that you could keep a couple of the legacy materials? Perhaps allow the dev community to vote on 3-ish classic materials to keep. From reading this thread, most people seem to want to keep Slate, Grass and Metal because the new versions have a completely different feel. This would be a compromise between keeping all of the legacy materials and keeping none.
That’s a shader ball, which has been increasingly seen in material/shader creation spaces for the later half of the past decade. It’s designed with a variety of curves and edges meant to show how the materials work, so that you don’t need to apply it to multiple different objects/whole environments.
Similar looking models have been created and been used to show material examples like the one used to show off materials like Blender’s 2.61 demo from 2013:
Some textures aren’t perfect, but personally for most of your examples that you’ve showed you just need to re-color them plus I won’t lie on the stuff you’ve shown I don’t think any of the materials fit together, not even in the originals. I don’t think you should criticize every update that Roblox does which makes you re-do something, I understand is frustrating but giving it some time to improve is always necessary.
For instance in this post it doesn’t fit together and looks more cartoonish but hopefully overtime we’ll either have an option to switch to old textures or get better ones. I personally don’t like the update but I’m willing to give it a try I suppose.
I think this is a GREAT update, however it seems like Roblox isn’t listening to the community. All we want is a simple option to toggle this for our games. We shouldn’t forced to use this update, the old textures work better in some instances.
I think people have shown enough examples, but the case for me is the same, the entire game with textures & colors is completely off. The way I’ve used materials in builds will completely ruin how it functions visually & I’ll have to redesign or relayout the whole thing again to make it work. But even then it doesn’t give the same feel, I wish there were simple options to keep the old textures in my game.
Personally, I believe that you should re-place the textures with newer ones that would be less cartoonish and less detailed as well. Older textures were good for the reason that they weren’t as detailed but all the textures kind of fit together well I suppose.
I can agree with you on that, but in some cases like in my post, materials like grass and sand were impossible to mend - grass looks like wet, green hair whilst the new slate looks like plastic when viewed in bright places from a bent angle (I’m aware ‘Rock’ is pretty much the new slate).
At the end of the day I think Roblox should still add some extra materials such as dry / dead grass, else it will be impossible to properly make amends.
I’m gonna preface this by apologizing in advance for what is inevitably going to be a huge rant that will sound very, very angry to an unnecessary extent. I love making games, I love playing them, and I really appreciate the effort here. Normally, the changes made to the developer scene are mostly positive and I very much support and appreciate many of the quality of life changes made. I’d also like to add that I may not be up-to-date with the conversation going on here and am basing this on the first few posts. With all that said, however:
This is… genuinely ridiculous. This is highly inconsiderate to almost every developer on the platform. I get that the intention here is positive and I very much appreciate that, however there’s just far too much wrong here to be able to wrap my head around.
You are essentially going to flip any semblance of art style in any game upside down by forcing these textures, willingly or not, onto the old ones. They’re mostly pretty nice looking textures, and clearly had a lot of work put into them. That doesn’t change the fact that they do not work as replacements for the old materials whatsoever. Not only do they completely conflict with the art styles of the previous ones, and in turn every single game that uses them, they look drab, faded, and honestly not very good when used in place of the old materials in game.
You’re offering us no practical solutions to the conflict of art style here other than remaking entire maps and games, and with textures at that. You want me to go through thousands upon thousands of parts and each add 6 different texture objects corresponding to their material. Not only that, but you also want me to get an asset ID for said old materials. Though I’m unsure about the performance impact of textures, I doubt thousands of texture instances in thousands of different parts is good for performance in the slightest in addition to that.
I know I sound exaggerated and unreasonably mad here, but I simply cannot comprehend why you’d be so stubborn on a texture change that not only actively hurts every game that uses materials that aren’t smooth plastic on the entire platform but the developers on them as well. All of this for replacing textures that had no issues with them whatsoever in the first place.
Even scrolling through each post here I’m seeing mostly highly negative reception, but the management appears to be deaf to the scale of the concerns here, though I’m thankful that they’re reading them at all.
Please. Either offer a way to switch between these and the old materials, add these in as new materials, or just don’t fix what isn’t broken. I’m sorry. I know I look horribly unreasonable here and am exaggerating to such an extent that it might look like my life revolves entirely around this change not being gone through with but I’d really prefer not giving in to what could be days of work just because we weren’t given proper compensation for opting out of this change.
yes. Obviously you won’t easily transition and have to redo parts of your game. This is completely normal and you should redo parts of your game in the beta before it releases.
Name one other “professional” game engine who forces such outrageous changes that completely redesign all existing content. I’ll wait.
i don’t know i only use studio. But if you have tested materials in blender. You would know that they are made from complex settings which means it is not possible to perfectly transition. Also i looked up unreal engine materials and it looks like it has none and you make them yourself.
I agree 100% here, like you said the new textures aren’t even bad there just not good replacements.
ok like the last post I made on the last topic of this discussion about new materials. It’s best for me to rate them all. (Probably not all of them since I forget some)
Brick: The old texture looks way better and smaller than the new one. Please add more variation to it like the old one. I appreciate if you do.
Cobblestone: Seems fine to me, I perfer the old material because it has a different variation. So mind keeping both? If not, please improve the new one to something more fitting for builds (especially structures)
DiamondPlate: Seriously needs to be improved on color variation. It’s too smooth and plastic.
CorrodedMetal: Looks ok to me.
Fabric: Mind adding different variations of them? (like 4 or more)
Grass: Please improve it.
Slate: Smooth. Sadly to see this go away since the old texture was rough. MOSTLY used as a stone material
WoodPlanks: Nothing to say. It’s good
Wood: Same as above
Plastic: Looks ok. Nothing much changed tho
SmoothPlastic: I’m not sure but doesn’t this has no texture?
Neon: Nothing Changed. But I would like to see different glow types in the Bloom FX (such as Additive (Makes Colors brighter the more the intensity of the glow)
ForceField: Nothing Changed also
Concrete: Looks good
Foil: I don’t use this material as much actually so idk what to say about it
Granite: Different variations of them please. We can have multiple
Glass: Looks good (really nothing much changed about it except for the transparency)
Marble: Uhh. Yeah can we have the old texture too
Metal: Cool. Mind adding smooth or non reflective types or properties?
Pebble: Please do anything about this, doesn’t fit with my builds
Sand: This is good. Looks kinda rough when it comes to some uses such as snow
Ok I could seriously give these materials a chance if these were improved to be better. They really fit only with voxel and up.
Perhaps the old materials could be kept for people remaking old games like 2016 games or lower
However if you are gonna force the new materials. Please introduce a custom materials library. That can be used to upload materials and be used by all developers. Including the old ones (which can be uploaded by Roblox themselves)
I would appreciate it. So will alot of others. Thanks
Not saying this to be rude, but this completely sums up everything wrong with the opinions of some of the few people who are in favour of the change being forced - they just go along with what they are told because they don’t know any better. Such changes are not “completely normal” and you would never see them forced on such a scale anywhere else.
This point further emphasises why people (myself included) want the old materials to be indefinitely kept. We don’t have many complex settings in Roblox for materials outside of adjusting colours and lighting, and forcing a new set of materials onto all existing content will just limit the creativity of developers further, especially when they are less versatile and usable than the ones that they are replacing.
I said in my reply that it does not look like unreal engine even has materials. These blender settings i was talking about are for when you make the materials. You will always still only set up color and reflectance but it will affect the color which means it has to be reset. If roblox kept the old materials the materials will not be as good as the lighting. Evolving the lighting means evolving the materials to make this even closer to unreal engine and unity.
I’m going to have to agree with many here - other engines such as Unity or Unreal don’t force updates (well, because they’re for making games of course), but regardless the point stands that many developers have a lot of projects and experiences under their studio (6+) and having to go back and alter the game to re-create the look of the experience (horror, dungeon-like, etc) because of a texture change would be pretty demanding and annoying.
Many devs spend a lot of time being creative with materials such as using “sand” for beds or in places that wouldn’t normally be sand for example, and even a slight texture adjustment can turn regular-looking objects into sandcastles.
Please roll out custom material support that way these new materials are uploaded as a sort of preset along with the old materials rather than replacing them internally. More options is usually better regardless! Each experience doesn’t need to have a modern feel with new materials, let experiences be unique and different!
Changing the current materials isn’t the answer as many of our old experiences look amazing with the old materials, so leaving these be and altering or adding new prefabs for new experiences would be a much-preferred option.
this is why they will make the extended materials after this. They know that you use materials for other reasons and now that sand is more specialized they announced extra materials completely new to roblox.
here is the list they provided
if they are gonna add all these new materials why not add a few of the old one in there? Really the only legacy materials I would want is granite, grass, and slate
