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.
I don’t have mush of a problem with this update. My only concern is the repeating texture. Textures such as sand and marble are WAAAAAAAAAY to repetitive. The pattern is way to obvious. I know there are ways to rotate each texture square randomly, but it doesn’t look like they’ve done that.
It’s because its supposed to resemble moss. Cobblestone has moss in line thingys or whatever its called.
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I’m actually curious, does Roblox listen to community feedback that often? Because there’s an easy fix to this whole problem. Just allow both textures. Some of the textures need some work though
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Nope. Evidently not. They only care about money and not what or who makes their platform what it is now.
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Please let us chose between old and new ones.
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If they only cared about Money, They won’t do this update in the first place since it DOES cost money.
I was honestly wondering about that too. In fact, what good does forcing everyone to “adapt” to a new style out of the blue even do? Have they even thought about this?
This update is going to make them money in the long run. The reason they probably did this update to begin with is to make the game more visually appealing to stockholders.
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