New Terrain and Parts Materials Preview Build! Oh YES!

[cunpliy]

Heres the issue with having different enums. What if someone wants to use only those. But when changing materials in scripts it it’ll change to the legacy ones because its using legacy enums. So then would the developer need to change every line it has it in? That would be kind of annoying and unnecessary time wasted. I instead think you can only pick legacy or new and not both. While limited it wouldn’t cause any problems.

[PysephDEV (Pyseph)]

As @IdontPlayz343 mentioned, I was talking about displacement maps.

[cunpliy]

Makes more sense. I was just giving an example on how stylized textures can look great still. Even if it didn’t have displacement maps they still would look great.

[Dobe_2]

As someone who is fairly new to developing with Roblox and has years of experience with other engines like Unity and Unreal, my biggest complaint with the platform has been the lack of control I have over how my game looks.

I find it so strange that recently you’ve been pushing for Roblox to adopt a realistic style when

1. The platform has never had a focus on realism.
2. Using realistic models and textures would massively increase load times and reduce platform support.
3. Very few, if any, of the people creating Roblox games have the resources to actually make a realistic looking game.

I’ve been very impressed with what you’ve been doing with Roblox as a platform these last few years, but you need to let developers do their own thing when it comes to their art.

I’ve got a couple suggestions:

1. We need the option to use our own textures on our terrains, or at the very least let us turn off the textures and just use solid colors!
2. If possible, give us the ability to create our own shaders, either through writing them by hand or through the use of a UE4 style material editor.

This platform has the potential to become something truly incredible, but you need to let developers have more control over their games.

[ImTheBuildGuy]

I don’t even know how to download the file

[cunpliy]

@Dobe_2

The platform has never had a focus on realism.

Actually it has been for a while which is one reason why updates like custom PBR textures and FIB3 exists.

@Dobe_2

• Using realistic models and textures would massively increase load times and reduce platform support.

They have said that the new textures cost the same as the current ones. And it depends on developers on how low poly they can make it while looking realistic and roblox is adding updates to improve loading times aswel

@Dobe_2

1. Very few, if any, of the people creating Roblox games have the resources to actually make a realistic looking game.

That’s mainly cause it’s very difficult from how much detail is needed and how laggy it can be. Though there are games aiming for it. For example a game called Hellreaver which is inspired by Doom Eternal and another game called Redline which is an openworld racing game which also focuses on realism. And they’re both trying to make it performant. And one reason why roblox is adding realistic textures is so games have better resources on making realistic games.

@Dobe_2

• We need the option to use our own textures on our terrains, or at the very least let us turn off the textures and just use solid colors!

Fortunately that’s an upcoming update to add custom textures to terrain. A reason why it haven’t been released yet is because from what I’ve heard it poses some issues when tiling them.

@Dobe_2

• If possible, give us the ability to create our own shaders, either through writing them by hand or through the use of a UE4 style material editor.

Sadly they have a lot of reasons on why you cant write shaders though they have said shader graphs could be a possibility. If you’re curious on why heres all their reasons said by some who works in roblox

Post-processing effects

@Mr_Root, @nomer888 and @ZarsBranchkin asked about the user-created shaders. They are referring to the hack week project by @darthskrill: http://blog.roblox.com/2016/01/hack-week-2015-shaders/ Here is why you can’t have nice things (warning: this is long and technical; I’m putting it here since some people asked me to share this publically, and I don’t want to create another thread in Public Updates just for that). The way the hack week project worked is by creating a new type of script that c…

[zblox164 (zblox)]

This feels like another way of Roblox forcing their vision on the community instead of giving developers what they actually want. The fact it looks like old materials are being replaced will force many developers to fiddle with textures for hours trying to fix a perfectly fine build with the old materials. Like many have said, this should be an optional update where you have the choice of old materials and new ones. Of course, this is Roblox so it’s unlikely what we want will happen…

[ziplocBag]

really? the new one is so much better and scaled then the old one imo.

[autoMATTlc]

I don’t really like the concrete texture. Like at all

There is a weird green shading to it and it does not look good. I want regular gray concrete

[wholbr]

Very excited to crash my snail of a laptop.

[PysephDEV (Pyseph)]

@Dobe_2

• Using realistic models and textures would massively increase load times and reduce platform support.

Roblox bakes the textures beforehand, I.e you don’t redownload them everytime you join - the textures are always installed in the app, which is why you can use apps such as Studio when offline.

@Dobe_2

If possible, give us the ability to create our own shaders, either through writing them by hand or through the use of a UE4 style material editor.

This would be very hard due to how Roblox is built to be - easy to use, no further complications needed. On platforms such as Unity or UE4, knowledge on containers, bin/quad/octrees and other algorithms is fundamental whilst practically no one on Roblox knows them - this is because Roblox is meant to be easy to use, without the user having to learn all this ‘fancy’ knowledge.

There’s a very low chance for shaders to be added, which you can read about here:

Post-processing effects

@Mr_Root, @nomer888 and @ZarsBranchkin asked about the user-created shaders. They are referring to the hack week project by @darthskrill: http://blog.roblox.com/2016/01/hack-week-2015-shaders/ Here is why you can’t have nice things (warning: this is long and technical; I’m putting it here since some people asked me to share this publically, and I don’t want to create another thread in Public Updates just for that). The way the hack week project worked is by creating a new type of script that c…

EDIT: cunpliy’s answer is much better than mine. These are just my personal thoughts on this

[AlphaEpsilon290 (Rick)]

If you read the original post, Roblox themselves said that there will not be any performance difference between old and new materials. So if your computer can handle old materials, it can handle new ones.

[a_eschylus (aech)]

I do have to admit, some of the new textures are quite snazzy…

Asphalt + Salt = Nice Roads

Coloured Concrete doesn’t clash as badly anymore

Some textures though still look absolutely awful, namely Slate, Cobblestone, Brick, and Corroded Metal (which looks like a crappy jpg on a pbr brick)

Brick no longer is brick-y, and looks awful when discolored with other colors.

All the rock materials look like discoloured displacements of each other. Disgraceful.

Now lets tackle fabric.

Guess which is roblox’s?

Spoiler

The Left

There are textures very similar, if not, better on the platform that preform better that don’t interrupt how fabric/carpety the already existing carpet is. The new fabric texture leans too much on the carpet side, which makes it hard to use it in a furniture piece.

[wholbr]

Im talking about the hyper realistic build images.

[IdontPlayz343 (FPS Enjoyer)]

Brick would be fine if it wasn’t for the discoloration, most users actually wanted bricks to be bigger, and they definitely look more real now. Other than that, I agree.

[twiceLanguish (HelIaNova)]

I don’t think the biggest issue with that build is the new materials

[mario118118]

I’d be ok with the new materials if I could enable the use of both old and new materials in my games. That would be great, if possible!

In a lot of my games people create their own things in the game by building blocks and changing any properties they like. I don’t want to change all old buildings to the new materials, but also don’t want to not have access to the new materials either. I’d love if there were options to use some of the old materials and new materials in the same place. That would be really helpful. Otherwise I likely won’t be able to utilise these materials in my games, which would be disappointing to be honest!

[LitTurtleMan]

Is this the new bricks… they don’t really look that good to be honest and it looks more of a poorly made texture in toolbox from the classic days. This will ruin most of my builds sadly and the aesthetic of most builds will be ruined and we might have to switch towards toolbox textures if this isn’t toggle-able…

[Terra_Verbis]

all my grass is a really weird shade of green, please dont tell me the grass color is final

[Terra_Verbis]

yeah this cant go well for games, even actively updated ones. I’m already seeing problems.