Oh dear, looks like the teaser in the internal document leak from last year has finally come to fruition…
I’m also not surprised, given justified community criticism of other recent platform updates (here, here, and here), that Roblox has not selected a member of staff to act as a figurehead for the update. Or maybe nobody wanted to carry that burden…
There are many reasons for developers choosing to stick with R6 which Roblox has simply failed to pay attention to here, which are definitely worth noting.
For a start, it is simply a fact that the appearance of many body parts (the default “blocky” look, Robloxian 2.0 etc) is substantially downgraded whilst using R15, which can be attributed to the fact that whilst engineering R15’s initial release (which I was on the platform to see! I’ve been around for a looong time now…), Roblox failed to carefully and intrinsically recreate the original “blocky” R6 look. The result is a rather ugly and bulky default R15 rig, which has never matched the original aesthetic well at all, which is quite clearly shown in Roblox’s imagery:
Issues with bundles when using R15, such as Robloxian 2.0, can be attributed to the fact that the UV mapping on individual body parts do not match their initial R6-based designs, leading to deformities such as badly stretched out classic clothing. This will ruin many people’s outfits, many of my own included. I do not want this.
This is going to break countless games, gears and tools on the platform unless it is sufficiently tested before this occurs. Just replicating the original part names is not enough considering the sheer number of scripts on the platform which are reliant upon moving and rotating these parts to fulfill their function.
This statement cannot be considered to be true unless all of the following statements are true prior to “true” R6 technology being removed:
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Body parts match their R6 counterparts, in terms of overall “look” and UV mapping with classic clothing
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There is an option to use the “unified” R6 emulation pipeline on the website on user avatars
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Animations behave in a 1:1 manner to the way in which they were designed
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“Classic” Heads should continue to utilise SpecialMeshes with the “unified” R6 emulation pipeline
If these criteria are not met by the time this feature goes live, your statement cannot be deemed true in any regard.
Whilst there are ways of justifying the removal of the original R6 tech stack, this just isn’t it. The simplified structure that R6 uses is, in many ways, preferable to many developers because it doesn’t look “natural” and because it suits their aesthetical design better. Not everything needs to aim to be hyper-realistic.
There is also the factor being ignored here in that many developers simply do not wish for their players to be allowed to wear layered clothing in their experiences. This must be accounted for prior to release.
If Roblox wants to replace the R6 tech stack with an emulated R15 pipeline, it must focus on spending the next few months on ensuring that there is both intrinsic visual and technical accuracy between the emulated pipeline and the original. This needs to be done properly, otherwise almost 20 years of work and carefully crafted development will be lost to time.
