We are getting reports on “Physics not working the way it worked before”. Apologies for everyone who might be effected by this rather breaking change.
As we have been warning everyone for the last few months, we strongly advise to test your experience with the new stepping method, as simluation results with adaptive stepping (60hz/120hz/240hz) will differ from simulation results using full 240hz simulations.
If the resulting physics behavior does not satisfy your previous requirements, please set the PhysicsSteppingMethod to Fixed.
I don’t know if you know this but… every roblox game is broken now.
If anything, please revert it back.
A lot of people who created on this platform don’t play roblox anymore, and they can’t fix this issue with their game now.
This includes the “Obby” genre too. A lot of very hard obbies are broken and most creators of these obbies won’t be able to fix them.
Please revert this. You’ll do a lot for developers who don’t know how to fix this issue
PSA
Hey everyone, we were expecting some games to report behavior changes but it feels like we should listen to the community at this time and revert the change for now. Apologies for any disruption this might have caused.
The goal for us still remains to soon have the Default mode support adaptive physics stepping. Thus we strongly recommend that everyone tests out their experience using Adaptive for PhysicsSteppingMethod, and see if your game physics is satisfactory with the reduced frequency simulations (and kindly DM me any serious issues if possible).
Hey ZacktheMinion! Sorry for any disruptions this might have caused with your game. Do you have a repro or any descriptions you could share on how this change was breaking your, or other people’s obbies? This would help us tremendously
I’ve seen so much flame for this feature but for me I’ve never had a single issue with adaptive time stepping, I don’t think the issues people have shown in reply to this post are due to the update itself or “Roblox being broken” but rather the code those games use not being able to account for the varying time it takes to process physics or rendering each frame, which is already a problem even without this update, it’s just less pronounced.
I’m my opinion any good physics and or rendering game code should be able to account for it possibly taking longer or shorter amounts of time to process physics and rendering frames, because it already does vary every frame even if not by a lot when using fixed time stepping.
I do understand that old abandoned games can’t fix this but that isn’t really at the fault of Roblox as a platform but rather the developers, not saying they should break them, but still.
Note: I am NOT saying adaptive time stepping is flawless, I’m saying I haven’t had any issues with it since it came out, I am seemingly not the only one either.
I’m also not calling anyone a bad developer, please take this with a grain of salt.
Adding on to my previous post, I’m glad to see not everyone has ran into issues with this setting. However, there are certainly problems with it. Dropping a 1x1x1 part 10 studs above an anchored part shouldn’t cause it to clip inside.
An API allowing devs to control a specific part’s stepping rate would definitely be useful. As a developer, we generally know what a moving part will be used for and can find the appropriate stepping rate. On the other hand, no matter how advanced it may get, Roblox’s engine can only guess.
I think that this change in behavior should not happen for old games, at all. Games that cannot be updated anymore. Change the standard option in new places only for example.
I am a huge supportor of these physics changes in general, and I’m also hoping for multiple modes instead of just adaptive (restricted to 120/240, more aggressive than adaptive etc).
Thanks for fixing the root part issue I brought up a few months ago
I feel like something like this, the developer needs an API for edgecases on stepping where I can force the assembly’s stepping rate.
This would be useful for things like player-controlled vehicles, or, as lots of people pointed out, characters. It doesn’t even need to force it to 240, it can force it to any of the three stepping modes, or let the engine dynamically decide.
Basically, something like the NetworkOwnership APIs that we have
I am a bit concerned. When Adaptive Timestepping was initially announced, Roblox announced intent to remove the Fixed option and snatch away control from developers yet again in order to push their own vision of optimisation. In newer threads, it mentions that we can opt-out of Adaptive Timestepping and the Fixed option will remain available - but we are still encouraged to test our experiences with Adaptive.
What is the move here? Is Roblox finally committed towards retaining the Fixed option however pushing Adaptive Timestepping as the default, or is there still intent to remove the option? If so, may insight be provided on why Fixed would no longer be an option? Some developers optimise physics and other systems enough to warrant the accuracy of 240hz and skip the arbitrary determination of Adaptive. I’ve expressed before that I really hate blackboxed features and lack of developer control.
