When unchecking the Use2022Materials and using the sand material, I’ve noticed the normals must not have been baked properly as the orientation can give very strange results as it no longer looks like the same sand when facing the other way from the sun.
You can kind of see from this image that even though the sun is aiming downwards at the sand, the light appears to be coming from another direction.
Appear to be related to this post:
Hi there,
Thanks for this report.
We want to let you know that we highly encourage all developers to transition to the new (2022) materials available in Studio. These new materials offer improved visual fidelity and are the focus of our ongoing development efforts.
Looking ahead, we are exploring the deprecation of the old material set. While there’s no specific ETA for this at the moment, our primary focus will be on supporting and enhancing the new materials. As such, we will not be prioritizing fixes or extensive support for the behaviors of the old materials, including issues like the incorrect normals on the old sand material.
We recommend migrating your projects to the new materials to take advantage of the latest features and ensure future compatibility.
Thanks for your understanding.
Why? Some people including me enjoy using the old legacy materials to encapsulate a specific vibe or building style. The least you can do is fix bugs like this before completely dropping support for the old materials.
Thanks for your feedback, we appreciate you sharing your perspective.
To help us better understand, could you clarify what specific visual styles, vibes, or building aesthetics you feel can’t be achieved with the current new Materials, by using MaterialVariants, or by leveraging SurfaceAppearance instances?
We’re keen to learn more about any specific limitations you’re encountering with the newer options when trying to replicate those older styles.
You can probably do an alright enough job with the new materials (haven’t been using them much) but I like to design my experiences with a 2015-2017 Roblox era in mind, specific color pallete, that brings back many memories to me and other people. The old textures are just iconic and shouldn’t be going away. I guess other people can back me up on this.
As most simple example - grass is often used as leaves. New realistic materials can’t do that - grass is grass only. Ofc, material variants exist, but in this case it’s easier to just use old grass texture, which is known for everyone.
It’s not limitations, or inability to create smth good, but rather people’s choice. Why I need to learn how to draw PBR textures or browse them if I can use old textures which are very good too?
It would be really nice if we could at least have material variants of the original materials somehow, since a lot devs are still relying on the aesthetics of the original materials.
FWIW this issue is not exclusive to 2022 materials, this also occurs for custom user MaterialVariants. There is an engine issue causing this problem, as is shown by the thread linked in the OP.
These parts on the right are simply rotated 180 degrees.
Probably relevant to the linked thread on OP’s post.
actually forget my last post, we can just use the ids from here
Thanks for all the insightful feedback. Especially to PeZsmistic for highlighting that this normal mapping issue might also affect MaterialVariants – that’s crucial information.
We will investigate this normal mapping behavior further, particularly with MaterialVariants.
We also acknowledge the points from kostis and GamEditoPro on the importance of classic Roblox styles and the community’s attachment to them. This is valuable feedback that we’ll discuss internally.
While our primary development focus remains on the new material system, we are taking this bug report and your stylistic preferences seriously.
Still not the convenience of ticking a checkbox on or off to toggle between the two. The current implementation of both worlds is balanced and shouldn’t be changed.
Thanks for being prompt and attentive on the matter. Cheers.
To give context, a lot of the modern materials are filled with baked-in colors that cannot be changed. The 4 materials at the top here all have random colors like black and brown mixed in that make it impossible for them to look like a low-contrast white (255, 255, 255). Similarly, the bottom row of materials have light colors baked into them, making it impossible for them to look like a solid (0, 0, 0) black.
Credit where credit is due however, the latest addition of 2024 materials (leather, plaster, rubber, cardboard, roof shingles, etc.) do not have these problems. The problematic materials were mostly a result from this 2021 set of materials where a lot of feedback was ignored.
I feel MaterialVariants are an easy cop-out to argue that the ‘old materials vibe’ can be replicated. And yes, from an engine perspective they do offer the necessary features. In fact, the image kostis shared is from my game(!) I worked on in 2016. And the modern materials aren’t good enough to replicate those feels, so I made my own pack of materials that do replicate the old feel.
However, this process took 2 months. Most developers do not have the skills or the time to create their own material packs that mimic that Roblox-y feel, hence why many developers are still sticking to the pre-2020 materials.
Regarding this bug report, if the issue described in the OP is indeed related to the linked bug report I made; I spoke to someone at RDC and they mentioned this bug was scheduled to be fixed in a few quarters. Given that RDC is coming up again soon, an update would be appreciated!
Lol it’s actually you I really just found it from google by typing in “roblox 2016 map”. What are the chances you were on the same topic xd
