Removing Outlines

You can use decals, surface guis, or even selection boxes to replicate the effect of outlines.

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But what would be the most efficient way? there could be over 10k blocks in my game.

Scripts can do this for you.

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I think he’s referring to how the game will preform for players if there are a bunch of decals/guis/selection boxes/whatever he uses on top of thousands of bricks

Outlines isn’t very performant either, having decals or guis to do it for you is probably more efficient.

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I tried to create outlines myself, but its just IMPOSSIBLE. We need a way from roblox to create outlines ourselves as this is just not possible to do.
image
It is not a great idea to remove something that some games cant live without and is impossible to create ourselves.
90% of those games are old games from 2011 and the owners probably already quit roblox, those games were forced to have no outlines, also 25k is a lot of games.

Before removing the outlines completely, please give us a way to solve our issues so that making outlines is easier and help us out!

I’d imagine how other devs would feel with roblox removing outlines.

Without outlines, my game can feel a bit disorienting sometimes and you are unable to see shapes that easily.




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Minor correction - outlines didn’t exist in 2011, they were introduced in July 2013.

For cases where the games use a lot of parts and some visual variety is necessary, I’d recommend using part color randomization script like this (you can run this in command bar once):

for _, v in pairs(workspace:GetDescendants()) do if v:IsA("Part") then v.Color = Color3.fromRGB(math.random(v.Color.r * 255 - 5, v.Color.r * 255 + 5), math.random(v.Color.g * 255 - 5, v.Color.g * 255 + 5), math.random(v.Color.b * 255 - 5, v.Color.b * 255  + 5)) end end

This is actually very similar to what we used to do on low end devices when outlines were enabled, but this way you can control individual part colors the way you’d like, e.g. keep some colors non-randomized and some randomized.

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This is not possible in my game as i have given everyone a paint tool, if you would see a difference in colour the titanic would look like the camouflageanic.


I think a lot of people would get upset if they cant get equal colours on their creations.

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That’s literally what outlines do though. You can clearly see the color differences in the screenshot you posted.

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is that exactly the same effect as the line of code you sent? I did not know outlines do that.

I’ll try it out via this method for now, but i’d still love to see something to replace this with. like some custom decals, something we can use as a building tool to create custom outlines which are way better than the old system.

You may want to try separating the building mode of your game with the playing mode. In the building mode you can do the random parts idea from zeuxcg. You can even go so far as to allow the player to pick the random colors if they like to keep a color scheme, but save a BrickColor or Color3 value in each individual part as to what the real color is, and upon play mode, change the brick color to that play mode set color.

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Finally! This means I can fix my lighting systems without worrying about the old lighting outlines being a nightmare :stuck_out_tongue:

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The script you provided just “emulates” the effect outlines have. I tried it out on my own game and it made things look hideous and/or discolored.

Isn’t “emulating” the outlines effect and recoloring parts the goal of that script though?
If you really want to try to replicate the effect of outlines you could try adding a SelectionBox to every part but it’ll probably be bad for performance, but it’s probably the only way to go if you really really need outlines.

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In a tech demo game of mine, using a selection box of 1, I was able to replicate outlines perfectly! Not sure what most of the fuss is.

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Most of it seems to come from people who are worried about the performance of makeshift outlines

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SelectionBoxes are probably better for performance than Outlines /shrug

100% not. It’s painful Destroying instances. Deleting a bulk amount of anything will always lead to a massive amount of lag, so will instancing a large amount of anything.

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I understand that ROBLOX is doing this in light of modernization, however, I have a few doubts.

  • Some legacy games use Outlines to operate
  • Some games require them to function properly

The workarounds ROBLOX gave are very helpful, however, it is questionable on how the change will play out until outlines are officially removed.

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