Roblox is a billion dollar company. They can afford to pay one person a days wage for what would be at the most 6 hours of work importing cherished textures into the new engine. There is simply no excuse for this.
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Likely would be more work than this, maybe even have some side effects, but they most definitely can afford to have a proper materials service made with a bit more time, which would have avoided forcing anything onto anyone.
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I appreciate your concern that I might be unable to take a screenshot in Studio but I am indeed using max graphics. They just look bad.
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While I agree with others that the new materials don’t look the best in some aspects and, it would be nice to have access to old ones. Eventually we all just have to adapt to this change. You all know as well as I that we won’t be going anywhere because of this. We will continue developing and eventually we will get used to these materials. We’ve had to adapt to far worse things before. This just encourages us to learn more about lighting in order to reach the desired look of a material. We are just taking one step back in order to take three forward
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I had never stated I was against the cherished textures. I actually like them as well, it would be great to still have them preserved in a way. However, since the team has stated that they had decided on this matter, I simply find it pointless to complain about, it’ll be like talking to a wall. I have plenty respect to the builders who use current materials, but this change is just unavoidable.
Developers should not have to adapt to this because there is no reason for not having a toggle for legacy/new.
Yes these new textures will allow for new things but just having them will make every game look so much worse
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I just realized that less than 2% of developers have adapted to this update. 
We do not need a toggle, I’m not sure where their nonsensical idea with going that route came from when they can simply be imported into the new engine.
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MrWindy (dev of Flee the Facility) told me he was hoping for a toggle.
Not that it’s not gonna happen, he’s probably in a state of mental delirium as a direct result of this being in front of his eyes:
This was slate. Snow is a decent replacement, but not only is it half the resolution of slate, but also more reflective.
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Has the developer even tried to change the materials and change the lighting yet?
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Sorry to say but even though these textures aren’t that bad, they are WAY TOO DRASTIC for a change and it just doesn’t help considering now we have to tweak our builds to give it the future proven desired look.
In no way, i am gonna blame the intentions of the developers behind this, but this time period given to tweak our builds ISN’T FOR EVERYONE. Consider those who have multiple maps (minigame games and stuff) in their games (70-100) . How will these people tweak their builds? considering all these builds have their own unique lighting as well?
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MrWindy is VERY inactive. Also, I was telling my sister about the new materials and I said that Airport’s marble walkways were “a skill issue”, because no airport has marble bridges.
HKIA uses carpet for flooring, and all Heathrow and Gatwick terminals use terrazo flooring. Shanghai airport uses granazzo, or shiny granite tiles.
Therefore, skill issue. But the game is rarely updated so it’s gonna be an issue for FTF.
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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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