Deprecating is the first step in dropping it all together, and it just means they’re going to put even less effort into maintaining it. The fact that they’re releasing a system to simulate R6 proves that they aren’t keeping it around forever.
My problem isn’t so much about deprecating as it is trying to point out how Roblox seemingly doesn’t care about the minorities anymore, and only care about expression when it gives the platform a good look.
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Deprecating doesn’t equal removal.
While that is true, if R6 does break when it gets deprecated, then you know that Roblox will do nothing about it right?
Percents are meaningless if you don’t provide where you got them from. There’s no graph provided. There’s no proof. These are baseless claims to the majority of developers.
Outside of this, I want to make a couple points. I think Roblox shines in the fact that a lot of things come out of the box. For examples, character controllers. It’s pretty tiresome and annoying to build one from scratch. Roblox is pretty cool in that aspect.
I think where Roblox fell apart is where instead of it being optional or an additive feature, it’s now integrated as part of the product that’s actively being forced.
For a company that has been in this space for a long, long time, it has failed to grasp that not every game is the same and providing a standardized approach does not fit because then, your games all look and feel roughly the same.
To any person who’s played AAA titles or developing those or even dabbled in other engines, Roblox games behave differently than others (for the most part) but, feel like a reskin of each other. This is obviously by design to keep people on Roblox (to feel like Roblox) but, it’s extremely limiting to anyone who wants to make different experiences on your platform.
Roblox should provide the bare-essentials and that’s it. That’s what R6 provides, has provided and will provide for years after.
The whole notion of “R6 is bad” is stuff that y’all have been feeding to people for years now. It was R15, RThro, whatever it is now idk, etc. it’s not actually, bad. It never was bad. It’s basic and easy to work with. It’s a bit stupid that you can’t have both and it has to be one or the other when they both belong to the same platform.
Lastly, I find it a bit funny that whenever there’s a controversial change, the official Roblox account is used. It’s like the bringer of stupid things at this point.
They already don’t do much with the system anyway so what’s the point of keeping up the façade? Last update to R6 happened in late 2016 and they’ve not touched it since. The fact that they’re even putting man powers into making so R6 can still utilize the new tech in a roundabout way instead of just pulling the plug on the entire thing shows you that they’ll keep it around.
You can fork the script related to the comp layer and edit it to your liking. Someone mentions it in the replies between the complaints.
They don’t need to update R6 if it’s not broken,
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R6 can still utilize the new tech in a roundabout way instead of just pulling the plug on the entire thing shows you that they’ll keep it around.
That’s not what R6 is. That’s not the issue, (Ignore this, i was wrong about this,deprecation means they won’t support it, so again if it breaks, they won’t do anything about it), and for the “advanced technology” part, you mean more advanced animations? That makes no sense, as I just said. That’s not what R6 is.
It doesn’t change the fact that they are taking the freedom of choice away from players, and instead making them rely on developers to implement R6.
As @sanjay2003 mentioned, Roblox has been downplaying and talking bad about R6 for years, even if they weren’t explicitly doing so. To add to it, I don’t see them doing anything about R6 if something breaks, but I do see them leaving it in the dust in favor of their new avatars and ideas.
that’s not what deprecation means. deprecation means Roblox will fix serious bugs with R6, but will not update it further as there is a superior acknowledged technology. R6 has been de facto deprecated for a while now, they’re just going to make it official once they finish this process.
Oh it does? Alr thanks for that info.
The fact that two avatar systems don’t work on the same platform is crazy to me. There shouldn’t be backwards compatibility between the two. They should be two separate things as two separate optional items. One being a basic controller and nothing more. The other being for more specialized / specific use-cases if players want those features in the first place.
R15 is ok but, it comes with its own set of challenges so, it’s not exactly a “this is way better” argument and truthfully, putting all your eggs in Roblox’s direction sounds like an unfortunate landscape in itself.
But R6 isn’t “the basics”. You think that R15 is just “R6 with extra limbs” when that isn’t the case, at least not anymore. R6 and R15 are different technologies with different code. If you want to animate with “the basics” you can still do that in R15.
Also you talk about R15 as if it’s fringe or experimental technology. R15 has been the preferred Roblox animation since 2017. Its starter animations been through redesigns. Even if you don’t agree with Roblox’s 98% metric, R15 is the dominant avatar type by a long shot.
I’m really confused by this due to how badly explained this blob of text is. This post seemed to be more focused on statistics rather than two serious questions like:
Will scripts specifically made for r6 still work after the update? These scripts utilize names such as “left arm” and “right arm”, which aren’t on r15. If the opt-out happens and old scripts aren’t supported, this would break more games than you could imagine.
Will animations using the old r6 rigs work after this update? I know many games, including my own, to use the r6 rig for animating. I also know that no one would want to reanimate all their stuff to r15.
Roblox,
I am in AWE of how awfully out of touch the replies to this thread are. For brief context, my background is from someone who has been making games on your guys’ platform since 2012, and I have lived and breathed Roblox development and have seen you go through lots of hurdles over the years, both good and bad changes. Unfortunately, if you go through with what this post is implying, this will be more catastrophic to the development space on Roblox than the filter-enabled event initially was. Only this time the damage will be permanent!
I have a multi-year game project I have been developing over the course of the past 3 years, and it includes hundreds of animations for the R6 rig done entirely through blender using open-sourced community plugins that DEPEND on the R6 character model. I have a working partner who I have been paying to do animations alongside myself for this project. I know a variety of others who think the same, as they heavily rely on the R6 character model for their game-development preferences.
I can understand deprecated code eventually going obsolete and breaking a game, as of the FilterEnabled update you guys enforced a few years ago. I get that now. HOWEVER, your CEO claimed a couple of years ago that R6 will not leave the platform, as it is part of Roblox to let developers develop for a variety of customization options that players can enjoy. This is completely unfair to the Roblox development community – developers who work hard to provide great games for your platform.
Your data is extremely skewed in a way you want others to see it, but I can see right through it. 98% of players being in R15 avatars is completely false, no matter how you spin it. This “data” set you’re using is including the 2017-2018 era of bot farms being counted as well, and may even be including banned bots as well, if this data was legitimately collected (although there’s no source even cited.) An absolutely MASSIVE amount of players prefer R6, and I’ve met more people on Roblox in favor of R6 than R15 (and front page games like Black Magic 2, Blood and Iron, Tower Battles, surf, & Lumber Tycoon 2 to name a few still use R6.) I’ve seen tons of developers switch from R15 development to R6, since animating takes twice as long. It’s good to have a choice of which rig to go for, as the developer gets to choose. Now, you’re removing our choice you empowered us with because of some skewed, completely incorrect numbers.
While there may not be as many front page games that are R6 dependent as R15, R6 is a fan favorite for indie developers that don’t have the money for a huge team to make complex animations that require bigger rigs, because it takes SO much more time and funding to develop.
Some may remember the Filter-Enabled update that was enforced back in 2017-2018. It broke every old game on Roblox and Roblox was working on compatibility for a few years to make them playable again (for instance, the backlash they received for making old games marked as “friends only,” where you had to be friends with the developer… on a list with 200 people max IF the developer was still active.) This update will definitely be worse, and here’s why – this time, the trust of the Roblox team will be at fault – as we were, once again, told by the CEO this wouldn’t be happening. If David Baszucki himself stated that a feature such as R6 is here to stay, that entirely implies it’s safe to use R6 as a foundation for building a multi-year project, or any game that has the aspiring intentions of making the front page in the future, therefore people will spend time and funds into their games with understanding R6 is here to stay.
Also, R6 isn’t a feature-lacking avatar either. It allows developers to take it above and beyond with new form-factors of engagement, without the unnecessary bulk of R15. It allows us to utilize our resources into other parts of our game we prefer to scale our games. Not every Roblox game is the same, and has the same needs, in fact. Think about games like Ployguns, Bad Business, and a lot of top-down games like Strategema and Rise of Nations, and new, emerging VR games that take R6 to the next level. They need the base foundation of R6 to do this.
If you go through with this and deprecate R6 avatar support, and make it so I have to redo hundreds of player animations, I will never develop on this platform again, and I’ll be switching to Unity.
I’m convinced the people here cannot read. Deprecation DOESN’T MEAN REMOVAL. We’re not even at the stage where deprecation is being a seriously discussed topic.
Here’s the Wikipedia article on deprecation.
Roblox has deprecated code from a long while ago still usable in Studio. This plan is in its early stages, so early, in fact, we don’t even know when R6 will be deprecated.
Honestly this isn’t even that bad of a update. At least it is still in beta and the original r6 is only being deprecated. I appreciate when Roblox still gives us an option to go back and they don’t release these kinds of updates without feedback.
By Roblox’s own definition, anything that is deprecated is something that they recommend you don’t use. It’s something they will not maintain support for and it will eventually become obsolete. They aren’t saying they’re dropping it now, but they’re also not saying it’s going to be here forever.
Deprecation is the first step to removal my guy what are you on…
Roblox Defenders when the multibillion dollar corporation does something no one likes: 
DEPRECATION implies that the feature isn’t going to be worked on anymore, (an avatar type 100 million Roblox users actively chose, as R15 is enforced upon signup for the platform,) including in the critical situation of anything being updated on the R15 avatar that is essential to be updated for the R6 avatar as well (such as SECURITY [Look under Known Limitations and the Game Security sections], VR mechanics, newly added features for players in general, etc.)
On top of that, it’s not like Roblox and the CEO on multiple occasions promised R6 would remain a core piece to Roblox as it gives users a choice… COUGH, COUGH.
Good stuff for a early version of the adapter.
I think the important thing I want to see done before it’s full release is the scaling is the exact same as R6. That’ll be a big seller for a lot of people.
I hope this update does not end up being an “opt out” situation. i think it would be terrible for the update to be automatically forced on old r6 games that are no longer necessarily being updated. right now some animations from r6 dont exactly work on r20 the same way. even if those are fixed, r20 is still fundamentally different from r6 and it shouldn’t be released in a forceful “opt out” scenario.
for the actual r20 rig itself… an r6 emulator should actually look like r6. right now its a deformed r15 with no elbows or knees. please use the original r6 character meshes so that the r20 look is as close as possible…
