Actually it has been for a while which is one reason why updates like custom PBR textures and FIB3 exists.
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
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.
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.
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
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…
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.
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:
EDIT: cunpliy’s answer is much better than mine. These are just my personal thoughts on this
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.
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.
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.
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!
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…
Colors are not final, and they’re baking the colors out of the textures. This is stated at the bottom of the original post.
Some New Part Materials have full color baked into them. We are currently removing some of this to give your more range while still allowing for color matching between terrain and parts
The bricks look better now, I just wish they would make them grayscale…
The old bricks were super low-res too… Have you not seen how many people complained that bricks were too small?
The new Cobblestone is great! but i kinda prefer the old one since it has 3D texture shading on it, the new one however does not really have that kind of 3D feeling on it feels like a normal texture. Overall great Update, Thanks ROBLOX!
While new materials and terrain textures is cool, I think the materials themselves should be much more similar to the originals while improving quality and detail. For example, grass doesn’t really look like grass anymore, it looks like green dirt.
I also don’t particularly like the new stone texture, it looks too much like Granite now.
To add to this, Metal looks extremely dark (I know colors are being baked out, but this is quite a specific issue given I primarily work with the metal material)
For example:
Old
New
Most materials look far too soft and lack detail at a distance. For example:
Old
New
And this is simply just not preferable for most developers - including myself. I don’t know what I’d do if this update carried out with the current textures, I would need to use Texture instances using old materials if I wanted to actually make any of my builds, greatly increasing the amount of time it takes to build and greatly decreasing my motivation to use Roblox as a development platform.
From what I see, these texture changes are geared towards smaller modern-styled games (For example, a subway station) - a category only a fraction of the entire community specializes in, and even then these textures make it extremely difficult to use materials in a larger-scale environment where you see objects from a further distance away than usual (i.e. 95% of builds on Roblox) or nature showcases.
I agree Roblox needs better textures, but these textures are not better.
