Perhaps allow both the new PBR materials to be used and the old legacy materials at the same time?
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Surface appearance allows that, but you can’t tile them like normal textures, they stretch like decals do, if you want to create a floor made of surface appearance textures, you have to use multiple parts.
I mean materials, not SurfaceAppearance. Like being able to use both the legacy sand and the new PBR sand for parts and terrain.
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If roblox doesn’t make this toggle-only this is proof they hate their devs
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Hi 
I just spent a bit of time reading all the feedbacks and viewing images of these new materials and seeing what others think about them. A few things to start with…
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Number 1: There is a reason why this TEST BUILD is out… one being for all devs to Test these new materials, the other one being for us to transition these new materials into our projects, so once the new materials are officially released, we will be ready to publish them and not worry about our projects looking ugly/weird.
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Number 2: A lot of these feedbacks are really nice feedbacks and actually screams “feedback”, although a bunch of these feedbacks also contain the misunderstanding as to why the new materials are out as a BETA test build for us. A bunch of developers complaining that their game looks different… well of course it does, It’s a whole new pack of materials. Let me tell you this when Future Lighting came out, your game’s lighting didn’t look exactly the same, did it? No. When you made Future Lighting compatible with some of your projects, you then started to like it, right? Exactly the same reason with these new materials. I was just like you, when I downloaded the materials my map looked ugly, why? Because once again these are new materials and they will make your game look different. I think the word change is needed here, without change there will be no improvements to Roblox. I think right now Roblox is giving us a ton to work with and we should thank them a lot for these new features. A bunch of developers who said that Roblox hates you for not replying to you, I bet you their reading all these and taking into consideration if they weren’t then you wouldn’t have gotten THREE new Test Builds with changes based on the COMMUNITY’s feedback, not just yours. They can’t make everyone happy, everyone will always complain about one side of the materials. Don’t be scared of the change. Let the change improve your project and let the change give your game a whole new look but this will take time and effort. I spent a whole week studying these materials and after a whole week, I got them to work with my project, what happened a week after? A new build came out, all my work is gone, by that I mean that all the changes I’ve done were for nothing, because now materials got even more updates to em, for example, I had pink trees in my map but when this Test Build was first out I couldn’t color it pink, I was forced to go with a red pink-ish… once the next Test Build came out, that changed and I went and colored my trees pink again and redid my entire map once more. My point is, in order to make your game look good and perfect with these new materials you need to dig into it and study it more and see which one is the best option for your game.
In conclusion, I think that Roblox will listen more to your feedback as we go forward, I’m just suggesting if you complain about these, for sure give them a try and study them more. Your game might look even better than before. Lighting matters, make sure to play around with that a bit as well. Highly suggest doing the survey they posted for us with this recent build!
Thanks for reading! 
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I simply don’t understand the logic of forcing people to redesign their games for the end product to be worse than what was originally wanted by the developer. Name one other engine where developers have unavoidable and unfixable visual changes forced upon their games - I’ll wait…
This could not be more insulting. Years have been spent by people finetuning and refining their games to look exactly as they desire the experience to be for fans and players, and to suddenly go up and tell us that the style we’ve built in can no longer exist because Corporate upstairs don’t care about us is absolutely abhorrent and will not be tolerated.
When Roblox released Future lighting, it was clear from the offset that it was not designed to replace any of the pre-existing Lighting.Technology properties (Compatibility, Voxel, ShadowMap) but to be used where it is appropriate and where developers wish to give their experience a realistic theme. People should not, and cannot be told that 8 years of hard work will be completely redesigned whether they like it or not because muh realism.
I don’t intend to come across aggressively in these posts and have massive respect for the engineers who’ve spent weeks and months working on these, but rather voicing my frustration that the leads and decision-makers won’t take our matters seriously. If this direction is continued upon, I really do not see it ending well for Roblox…
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As I stated in my post, I said that Roblox can’t make everyone happy, people will complain about something at the end of the day. I’m sorry I don’t keep up with the other engines nor need the feel like I need to. Every engine is for itself… things other engines do that aren’t the best and Roblox doesn’t. So you are saying just because other engines do this, Roblox should too? No, I don’t agree with that. Could be just me tho.
Never had the intention for this part of the post to be insulting, I just mean that there is always room for improvements, some people dislike change, can’t blame them for that. I understand that years have been spent on projects, and maybe let that be the reason why those games need a new look to fit what the new Roblox will look like. Without change, the platform will get boring, and then it’ll be the end of Roblox. But with more RIGHT change the platform will grow and will bring its targetted audience higher and higher is what Roblox wanted for the past years. They care about the developers, if they didn’t care they wouldn’t have given you all these new features during this challenging time.
That was an example, I didn’t mean literally. And to finish it off here, Roblox’s goal is to upgrade the platform. I’m here just like you missing some of the old materials. But hey uh before these current materials we have out there in public, there were other materials out there in the public that got removed and got replaced by these great materials that we have now. 5-10 Years later these beta materials will probably be different as well. What I mean is the platform is growing and changing, if you aren’t okay with change then… there’s that, nothing Roblox can do to make everyone happy.
Oh please don’t start with the “Ending well for Roblox…”, that wasn’t the best choice of words here in this sentence.
Thanks for replying, glad you replied and shared even more feedback about my post. And here’s my answer to you, thanks for reading!
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The only thing I can say about Roblox that they are improving their engine by alot (for example, Future Lighting, Mesh Materials, etc)
But Roblox still wants to support the past due to. Old games being completely unplayable.
Also a small lighting change from 2019 such as Technology.Legacy is no longer here because of performance issues with Legacy and Voxel.
The quick alternative is Technology.Compatibility
Like they said. Compatiblity is not exact to Legacy. The only major difference about legacy and compatibility is the bloom (Bloom in legacy is Blurry. Meaning this can be replicated in Compatiblity if possible. (insert a bloom effect with an intensity of 0, and then insert a blur effect to replicate the effect. Not perfect since it blurs the entire screen but still works good. unless there is a better method to get only neon blurry) While in compatiblity is actual proper bloom. But it’s not much of a problem to the past)
Compatiblity was really made to not make anything break on lighting on old games.
Roblox however is just improving their platform but tries to not break the past. That’s probably why you think these old roblox games are still playable right now. They still look similar to what it originally looked like for that time
Roblox isn’t really meant for all devs to go to instant realism. You can choose many many styles including your own if you are that creative.
However there is still limits in the platform already. But doesn’t mean you cant do anything for what you can’t do.
Is this even related to the discussion. Well it’s kinda a bit of a response to one of the replies above actually.
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Lighting matters, make sure to play around with that a bit as well.
I do agree with this a lot, when I was playing with the new materials, I went to Phantom Forces, a game which uses Compability lighting. Concrete, Wood and Metal looked amazing, but Pebble, now looks 3d, and with flat lighing, it just looked off.
That’s why we need to keep the new materials optional, I don’t think shadowmap will come anytime soon to many games due to performance reasons.
My point is, in order to make your game look good and perfect with these new materials you need to dig into it and study it more and see which one is the best option for your game.
The problem with this is that there are games that are VERY complex, imagine having to redesign multiple maps before this update rolls out, but, if Roblox makes it so you have the legacy materials and the new materials, it will be fine. If developers want to make their game have the new textures, they’ll have time to remake everything without making the game ugly, or if you prefer the old brick texture, but you like the new concrete, you have the choice to use both the old materials and the new materials with each other.
But, I’ll give credit to Roblox too, I understand it is very hard to make materials, and a face lift is needed to make the game look good, look at the new pebble, it LOOKS 3d:
These new materials are gorgeous, under the right circumstances of course, developers NEED to have an option between legacy and new materials.
But, some games (especially with future lighting) look very good, here are some screenshots:
Some games might not look as good as these photos, but I really like the textures, and I still think Roblox should allow us to use the old textures, for example, in the image above, look at the couch, old sand looks way better than this texture, but new sand looks way better as ACTUAL SAND.
But I respect the amount of work that has gone into this update, and I know Roblox have the best intentions in mind, but I still hope it becomes optional.
12 Likes
The last time materials were updated was in 2013, at least 7 years ago. However, the Roblox 7 years ago is nothing like the Roblox of today. There are people here who make a living off of this platform. For Roblox to come in and to tear down all of their builds they’ve been working on is insulting. I do agree that this platform needs change, but this not good change. Simply put, these materials are not good replacements. You can’t just chalk it up to “Times are a-changing”, times do change, but this type of change is completely avoidable. A virtue of Roblox has always been backwards compatibility whenever possible. That’s why they’ve kept R6 around after the release of R15, thats why they made comparability to replace legacy lighting, etc. I think Roblox is more than capable of managing two material systems at once.
Furthermore, I am absolutely baffled that Roblox chooses to market these materials as an “upgrade” of sorts. They’re not even good replacements. Everything with the new materials is flat and bland.
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Fully agree with almost everything here, however I do want to point out for anyone unaware, that it is exactly the same material/rendering system being used for both sets of materials which further justifies keeping both sets around - they both use specular, diffuse, normal and reflection DirectDraw Surface (DDS) files and are both computed by a system which was last majorly tweaked with Phase 2.5 Future is Bright (January 2020).
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the top image here looks a lot better then the bottom that uses the new, like you said it makes it look flat and bland.
It also kinda seems flat, Have you ever noticed the cobblestone is slightly groved they should do the same with bricks
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Weird part is the one on terrain looks worse then the one on part.
The thing here I fail to understand is why Roblox doesn’t just allow both to be used in conjunction with eachother. They’ve added new materials in the past, why not just make these new ones? They DO use the same system, in fact, you can literally just mod your player’s files to use the old material textures and you’d be seeing the same thing as normal. It makes no sense why they’re so intent on a replacement when the community has a clear majority against it.
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I feel the need to refute a lot of this.
First and foremost: This is no longer merely a test build. This is the last major build before this goes to QA and gets shipped. Not a lot has changed since the first build, even with a lot of community feedback. What we’re seeing is very close to the final product.
I do not know how you managed to gloss over this, but you seem to think that everyone should be required to adjust their games to what Roblox wants, rather than their original intended vision. Why should we, as developers, be forced to fix something ROBLOX broke? That’s not our fault, so why should we have to bother? What if a developer quit Roblox, doesn’t know about the update, and now his game looks ugly forever?
You also haven’t considered how much developers will need to change. I have several, several games that have been made over the course of 6-7 years now. I would have to manually change the material of every part of every single game in that entire library. Not to mention the countless models I’ve uploaded to the website and use as admin inserts. I would literally have to spend months to fix everything to adapt to the new materials.
Another thing you failed to address is the new lack of versatility in the new materials. The old materials (especially sand and grass) were useful for a multitude of different things. Now, they have aspects that make them no longer suit those roles. “But you could just use some of the other new materials instead!” I hear you saying. No, I could not.
I have gone through this entire test build and tried to find alternatives to materials that would fix the look of my models and games and make them somewhat closer to their intended visual style. There are no good alternatives for slate, sand, or grass. I could not fix the problems presented without custom materials. I have a Withered Freddy model that uses slate to differentiate it from my Non-Withered characters, which use concrete. Slate looks like a rough and withered material, but now it looks like layered plastic. There is no good looking alternative to the old slate.
Similarly, my humanoid characters use Sand for their clothing, as it somewhat resembles a cloth-like texture. While the new sand could theoretically still work, it has “stones” baked into the texture, and as a result, the clothing literally looks like it has rocks stuck into it. It also looks bad on darker colors, like black.
Sure, we could try our best to make our content resemble it’s former appearance, but it would never be even close to what it was before due to the lack of visual similarity to the old materials. There’s just not much of an alternative at all.
The reason people didn’t complain about ShadowMap and Future lighting is because prior to those launching, Compatibility lighting was launched, which is very similar to the Legacy lighting. It meant that old games still looked as they should, with VERY minor differences that are nearly impossible to notice.
The same cannot be said for the new materials, where an option like this is completely non-existent as of now. The point is that Roblox needs to allow these old experiences to remain as they are intended to be without forcing unwanted modernization on them.
I appreciate that you want to give Roblox the benefit of the doubt here, but you need to look at the bigger picture and see why this feedback is being pushed so strongly by the community.
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For terrain lol. Sorry I forgot to say that.
I recently sent in a part of the survey, I just hope most of the concerns Some of the developers here have voiced don’t get un-noticed like my own.
In my own opinion like I’ve stated in my bloated post before.
I love the textures but I feel like it’s be better if it was just added onto the texture library rather than just switching them out with the older ones.
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(edit: I was informed that the new build has a new texture for corroded metal, disregard this!)
The corroded metal texture could be improved by offsetting the spots on the metallic map. Basically, the non-metal rust spots should be shrunken by maybe a pixel or two, so that the very edges of each rust spot are actually metallic. This is so that the current effect of a whitish border will not be present - that is the result of the pixels on the albedo for the metal being at least partially nonmetal, probably because of texture filtering of the metalness map blending the border of the spots into the metal (and the solution that I’m describing is a relatively common practice).
Assuming that substance designer is being used, this could just be blending an edge-detect node with the mask for the corroded spots, for example.
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I despise the grass texture wholeheartedly:
Even when attempting to make it look “roughly better” using blender, the coloration on the texture makes the color darker than it actually is:
Maximum neon green as an example, only looks like it brightened just a bit.
All other textures are quite neat though with some exceptions but:
Sand:
Slate:
Snow:
Wood:
Wood Planks:
(Cycles looks even better but my computer is slow so I cant handle that 
)
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