More ironically, if they didn’t have to keep iOS support, then it’s possible we’d be able to have both old and new textures simultaneously.
1 Like
i agree with that, and that would really help a lot of developers.
also i don’t think some roblox employees hated the old materials, i think they just tried to improve the older ones because, while the old pebble isn’t bad and looks so different to the new one, i can see why it was replaced. it didn’t even represent the pebble as it is in real life, it looked more like a sponge.
This platform has 210,000,000+ active players and they have to make every single top developer uncomfortable and depressed so that a small group of 150,000 children with bottom of the barrel phones can install the Roblox app? Don’t be a yes man/neutralist, call them out. If you let them take an inch they’re going to take 100 miles. Before we even get custom materials we’re having this forced upon us which is once again, something no one asked for or wanted.
5 Likes
Most people used it as spong or as a rubber floor, so it should’ve stayed in my opinion, or at least improved to have more holes like old concrete so it brings it closer to real life.
Now we got to deal with this instead!
Personally I agree with you here. In fact, I think that Roblox shouldn’t support such trash phones.
it can easily be converted back. practically every game stores materials in this way. grayscale textures stored in rgb channels.
“Some time” means 1 - 2 years if we’re lucky. Look at how badly the SurfaceAppearance object flopped. Whatever custom material system we get is most likely going to have a heavy impact on performance for unknown reasons (spaghetti code that will never be improved upon) and will we simply have to ‘get used to’ and ‘deal with’ it, because it’s a ‘step backward necessary to take 10 steps forward’.
3 Likes
please, calm down. generally speaking yeah, it makes sense for roblox to accommodate the lowest spec players. roblox is meant to be accessible to as many people as possible.
the change is very big and the pebble material improvement is good, they should however add a sponge material to keep the old pebble texture vibe still on the platform, and same for the granite, they should add a dark granite to keep the vibe
I’ve only managed to find this about custom materials, but it says nowhere that these will be coming soon.
In this screenshot here, the rock lacks any depth whatsoever, the grass looks so flat and fake, and looks godawful on the trees. The ground looks like turd. I know I’m exaggerating here, but genuinely these materials do not feel right and make the game feel very off.
This place has seen better days.
1 Like
is specularscale and diffusescale set to 1, ambient light 0, etc?
Yes, both are set to one while the ambient value is a rather low level.
the custom material or surface appearance feature (right now they are only available for meshparts) is still in beta and its going to release soon. this is gonna be available only for meshparts for a very long time, but in a while it might be available for baseparts as well. and about the terrain, i cannot help with that and i don’t think they are gonna take in consideration to keep the old textures for the terrain, or make them in any way change-able.
1 Like
might
No guarantee about that yet. I’m not convinced custom materials for baseparts will be arriving soon/
This situation isn’t comparable. Roblox is now becoming a large game dev platform and many are trying to get realism out of it. Compressing textures noticeably, creating blurred messes like the rust texture, is an active decrease in quality. Unless Roblox fixes issues, like metal being too reflective, textures looking too wet, and fabric being tiled at an inappropriately large size, this texture update will be considered a downgrade for most developers.
4 Likes
That’s because SurfaceAppearance currently maps textures to the UVs of a given mesh, while the default Texture/material behaviour uses a tiled projection method. I don’t personally understand what makes updating the existing Texture objects to use additional maps such a technical hurdle, though.
there is still plenty of time until this update fully releases just so everybody can test their games and change what doesn’t look good. while i do understand people give their feedback about this, i don’t think anybody should just complain that their game will be ruined, because nothing is or will be ruined. having that time before release, gives everybody a chance to make their game look with the upcoming materials, for example if the slate changes the game looks by a lot, you can replace it with snow or rock because the snow, rock, basalt and many others give that old slate look. so there will be a workaround to keep your game’s look similar to what it is right now
1 Like
A lot of materials have absolutely no replacements to them.
Don’t you guys love seeing a repitive grass texture? It honestly looks more like gel or a bed sheet than grass.
Old grass material for comparison:
Apart from the clear downgrade that is the new grass texture, I’m excited for the wood texture. It’s amazing
Also don’t force this please, I don’t care if It takes me 5 seconds longer to join my game, i’d rather see actually good looking games with the art style they already present in which we all know and love.
2 Likes
I tried quite hard to look for improvements in my game, but “ok, good, they didn’t change this too much so it still looks like it was supposed to” was about as good as it got.
I’m making a sci-fi space game and I end up using a lot of materials differently than their intended purpose, for example dark blue granite looks great as some kind of alien-like material. I’ve tried all the new materials but none comes close, with marble looking somewhat alright-ish, but only up close.
Metal is a different story. This facility was supposed to be metallic and somewhat dark, but not too much. Well, that’s exactly what happened, changing the brick colour doesn’t affect anything, neither does tweaking the lights, even when the floor looks like a neon, the walls are still dark. Now it looks like some lair of all evil, not a research lab.
Terrain sandstone and part slate is yet another thing. The old materials looked very distinct and solid. The same cannot be said about the new ones. The rock kinda works as a replacement for the slate, but it still sticks out and doesn’t blend well with the surroundings. As for terrain sandstone, it makes up over 60% of the rather expansive, desert-like map and I have absolutely no idea what could I replace it with.
Funnily enough, these are 3 main locations on the map, and the look of each has been damaged in another way. Like many people mentioned, a lot of the old materials each had a huge amount of uses and while we now have more materials, they are much more use-specific, which leaves many with no alternatives.
I definitely want some of the new materials, the new concrete looks great for certain applications (though once again it fails to look like the rough kind, used in industrial places), but like I said earlier, the increase in download size is a small price to pay for keeping the old materials, and it could be minimised even further with certain steps put in place.
4 Likes