New Terrain and Parts Built-In Materials - Release Build

Updates Announcements
#1571

As a creator on the platform for more than a decade, I have some choice feelings.
Not making this an option is ABSOLUTELY what will cast away long-term developers.

I, myself, have 300+ games over my profile and group. ~50 are references, ~15 are showcases (some privated, some not.) Almost all of these new textures have destroyed my showcases. I have games which date back to 2012- of which I modernized for reference in my journey. I’ve done this too many times, ROBLOX. I am NOT the only one who’s experiencing this. I do not want to redo 300+ games. This is almost impossible with the part counts, styling, and tools used.

I’ll repeat this again. Not making this an option is going to destroy games.

It is time you be transparent with us, and listen to your developers more. We need more influence in the engine, and I get there are limitations, however, this has had months to be thought out. The textures should have more reiterations and the roblox engine should have been smoothed out in preparation for this, alongside warnings for MONTHS in advance that these textures would totally replace what we have, however, we got nothing of the sorts.

3 Likes
#1572

We’ve had warnings since Early May, in another topic regarding these new materials.

How about we utilise all the files and have both textures simultaneously?

#1573

Not really - they announced the new materials but initially gave developers an illusion of choice. Only after 1000+ replies did they change course. Not good enough.

2 Likes
#1574

How about creating a new Enum for the newer materials and continue to allow developers to use the current Enum as normal, maybe something with the name of Enum.NewMaterial? That way, developers can easily use the old and new materials. In the material list, these would be combined together or possibly sorted between old and new, with new being first.

2 Likes
#1575

As a developer, everyone agrees that the new material update is cool but it will ruin the horror game developer day on studio. Like, old concrete texture make a horror game scarier but after this update it ruined

#1576

Or maybe create a new button like under the material button:

Use New Material = true

1 Like
#1577

Yeah, something like that could also work.

3 Likes
#1578

Again, gating off both sets of materials when they’re both there using the same system is counter-productive and pointless. If you have both sets, why not just let everyone use both?

4 Likes
#1579

This is super cool and all, but where are custom materials? Seriously, being able to use the same tech for placing default materials for custom materials would be a game changer. It would allow for much more creative freedom. In general, allowing developers to modify every material and texture would come in handy for all of us. This includes terrain materials, grass decoration textures and all of those. And if long loading times are the issue, then let developers take the responsibility over that.

But yeah I think these new materials are super nice and will definitely look good on many projects. Though that being said, like many have pointed out it might and will ruin some games’ aesthetics. That is inevitable unless you add a way to use the old textures OR wink wink use custom materials. :wink:

3 Likes
#1580

The SurfaceAppearance is a sketchy holder for it currently, but it should be at least tileable or colorable.

3 Likes
#1581

This would work and having both sets side by side would be a great idea.

1 Like
#1582

They did indeed give us the illusion of choice in December. If you took the survey in late April however, it would say about it being forced.

2 Likes
#1583

I know of surface appearance, and I use it constantly. It’s just not very efficient for consistent texturing unless you’re really careful with unwrapping and all that other set up. And yeah tileable and colorable for sure. Should also add back in the roughness value property they had in the beta release, that sure was handy and cool.

1 Like
#1584

We’ve had this beta way longer. They’ve had time to think this through. Early may is still not enough time to redo showcases.

#1585

Yeah, that’s made really sense

#1586

they said that using both materials at the same time would lag roblox

#1587

Not very correct. Having both material files would only take up about 222MB, which requires only 222MB RAM which everyone has.

Add a few hundred megabytes for all the other assets and the game and you’re still under 1GB usage.

There’s no problem at all.

1 Like
#1588

222MB VRAM*

Keep in mind all these graphical assets are loaded on the GPU, not the CPU. (Well, maybe on both.)

#1589

Is that too much worse or is it just a small performance increase? I’m not that great with VRAM.

#1590

Also bearing in mind that you only would end up with the materials actually used in a game being loaded into RAM - so long as a game doesn’t use literally every old & new material at one time in a huge place, there would be no problem. Old places would still only load the required files they currently use.

1 Like