New Terrain and Parts Materials Preview Build! Oh YES!

[ziplocBag]

in case no one noticed, the car is re imagined from the red tool powered car from 2006.

[qSinfil (Sin)]

is it ment to look like a cartoon

[a_eschylus (aech)]

We (as creators) do have a right to complain in a few instances because we have showcases that date back months, years, (some of us, a decade) which will be irreversibly destroyed. Not all of us would like to redo 5+ 10000+ part showcases in order to keep them up to date with textures.

While I love the texture update, I’d rather (to provide real criticism instead of just complaining) see PBR return to brickparts, and see a subsection where you can use the new textures on said brick parts without interfering with the current existing (soon to be legacy?) textures.

[cunpliy]

Issue with that it can cause a lot of scripting issues when doing that though. What if a game wants to use the new ones and old ones but has scripts that change materials. What would the new one be called? But if you name it a different name then you would have to go to every line and change it which will also affect games that want to go fully new materials. There’s a lot of issues doing this can bring scripting wise.

[cunpliy]

None of them do. All of it is PBR.

[CamBlockz (Gus)]

Nooo not the fabric texture Rip it was a beauty

[IdontPlayz343 (FPS_Enjoyer)]

I think Pyseph was talking about these:
The image shows materials that use displacement maps.

[ittrgrey (Ittr)]

This would likely mean using different enums for the new materials and changing how the material dialog experience is to make it less cluttered than a drop-down menu. The positives outweigh the negatives.

[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.

[TrojanHorseAttack]

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.