Physical Draggers Full Release

[JoshSedai]

Hello Developers,

A few months ago, we released a beta feature that more clearly separated out the geometric and physical modes in our draggers. We’re beginning to roll these out to all users, but we made one change based on your feedback that we want you to know about.

Old UI:

New UI:

When you’re in Geometric mode and you click on part of a Model, we select the whole model. You can Alt/Option-click to select the specific scope you click. When you switch to Physical mode, by default, clicking on part of a Model selects the scope and you can Alt/Option-click to select the whole Model.

We’ve added a setting - “Physical Dragger Selects Scope By Default” - which lets you change that behavior. Toggling the setting off makes it so that Physical mode behaves exactly like Geometric mode: clicking on part of a Model selects the entire thing, and Alt/Option-clicking selects the scope.

We hope you enjoy these dragger improvements (and we have much more coming soon)!

[jmkd3v]

Very interesting! Is there any reason that the scopes differ between the Geometric and Physical draggers?

[JoshSedai]

In Geometric mode, you’re likely to want the Model itself, and that’s what we’ve done historically. Physical mode is new(ish), and we consistently found it was most useful to select the scope by default.

[BostonWhaIer]

This is really nice! I am not personally part of the animation community but this probably gives great utility to them.

To add the ability to discern between scopes and when you have very complex models its hard to locate exactly what you want and you can just switch back and forth and ignore geometry upon your selection.

Nice to see more and more useful things being integrated into studio, pretty legit.

[dekkeda]

This is very helpful for builders! Amazing! Can’t wait to use this
It’s awesome now I don’t have to change my increment every time and can just change the mode.

[HungryBoy02]

Not to re-itterate on what other people have said, but this is a great feature, and I will be using it in the future to make my games.

[M_caw]

I can’t wait to try this feature! Didn’t even know it existed before this topic, and it may help me with development.

Especially a big thank you for pointing out Alt + Click was a thing… although not the focal point of this announcement. This will save me so much time when building instead of diving into properties only to guess which part I was clicking!

Thanks so much!

[Auropath]

When I was trying it out (in Beta) it was really cool and easy to use. I think that now with all developers having access to this will make it easier to tell the difference.

[GoldenBloxxed]

(from what i understand), no longer will I need to ungroup just to select one part out of place or change one part of a model. Thank you!

[CalloDevelops]

The new UI looks clean, refined and awesome! Will look a bit weird for now.

[CaptainWeetabix]

If you want to select a single part of a group, you can already do so by hold down the Alt key.

Alt - Select a specific part within a Group.
Ctrl - Select multiple individual parts at once.
Alt+Ctrl - Select multiple parts within a group.

Hope this could help!

[CaptainWeetabix]

Seems like an interesting change, I look forward to trying this out! Like I said on the article announcing the launch of the new draggers, I was at first hesitant of the new design, however they have definitely grown on me since then.

I enjoy seeing these sort of updates to the draggers seeing as they play such a fundamental role in development. I’m looking forward to seeing this update in action.

Also, I know that this hasn’t been mentioned in a while, but do you see the possibility of the Rotate Orbs ever making a return? Even though they work sufficiently without them, the Orbs were useful on the old Rotate Tool.

Overall, seems like a great new feature.

Edit: I just tried out the new feature, incredibly useful!

[Swinsor]

How very exciting!

This seems like a good time for me to start learning to build! Aha.

[ItsKoiske]

This is disappointing… we were promised that the Roblox avatars would be compatible with the physical draggers and they’re not… Can we at least expect this to happen sometime soon?

[JayPlays_JP]

This is a huge improvement! I can’t wait to use this feature. Roblox has improved a lot recently!

[GoldenBloxxed]

I seem to be not as educated in studio as the rest of you guys, haha Thank you!

[TheCrypticRunner]

@JoshSedai

New UI:

this change has really bothered me for a while. always made me misclick when looking for collisions or constraints and when you’re searching for constraints, you have to go scavenge for it in the model tab. at least putting the icons back would confuse less.

[tnavarts]

@CaptainWeetabix

but do you see the possibility of the Rotate Orbs ever making a return?

Unfortunately no. Almost all of the vocal holdouts that were initially against the new rotate visual eventually came to like it better after getting used to it, so there’s not enough reason for us to provide that variant (at the cost of new dragger features having to work both with the orb and the arc variant).

Though we are keeping the dragger code very forkable (it does not rely heavily on any RobloxScriptSecurity APIs), so there’s nothing stopping a community member publishing a plugin version of the rotate dragger that has the orbs.

[JoshSedai]

We have some improvements to the rotate widget planned, but we punted them in favor of something coming soon that I think you’ll really like.