Removing Outlines

outlines have been deprecated for a year now and you’ve had over a month of warning that they will be removed
it’s on you if you are still using them instead of switching over or finding an alternative

4 Likes

There is no good alternative at all.

4 Likes

Make a option to enable it back but state that it only works in studio. As me and my team use it to build easier. So we don’t overlap parts easier.

1 Like

maybe they could add outlines as a viewing mode in studio like how wireframe is going to be when it comes out

1 Like

I never use outlines. I can just place parts without that help.

Weren’t outlines considered a bad update when they came out anyways? I can understand that seeing features go away can be hard but this is a very minor thing and won’t really matter in the long run. The only bad thing here is that it will break part of the style of some older games.

1 Like

Yes there are; many have been posted repetitively.

No offence intended ,however I genuinely can’t tell if you’re ignorant or a troll at this stage.

Decals and selection boxes are not good alternatives.
Selection Boxes do not stay a consistent size and both could imply managing hundreds of objects which have a much higher performance implication.

6 Likes

I am quite certain that there is a negligible performance difference between outlines and selection boxes.

If you are definitive that SelectionBoxes are poor for performance, please test this theory before claiming so.

There is a very significant difference between the perf of a SelectionBox and the perf of outlines. Outlines are simply an additional computation in the shader that’s already getting run to render the part material, SelectionBoxes are an entirely separate piece of geometry that has to get run through the rendering pipeline. Plus, they’re adornment geometry, which means they’re dynamically generated every frame, adding even more expense.

5 Likes

I ran a test with SelectionBoxes as outlines:

Here’s a ‘before’ photo:

Here’s an example showing my 0.001 thickness selection box:

Running this script:
image

This is the result:

And here’s some more screenshots:

As you can see from the Micro Profiler, there isn’t much of a cost when using SelectionBox outlines.

2 Likes

Those screenshots cannot show a performance difference because you’re running at or close to the framerate cap of 60fps either way. You’ll need to load up a place with enough geometry that you’re running at less than 60fps even without the outlines in order to accurately gauge the difference in performance.

2 Likes

Here’s a place which I badly perform on; this may or may not be helpful enough to judge the performance difference.

Before


After


1 Like

I believe outlines were only ever useful when you were trying to differentiate between two parts that where close or even together. I’m glad they’re gone since quite literally only 99% of games used this and I don’t really know any uses for it, unless your aiming to have an old style brick or building type game

In some cases, depending on the geometry and usage patterns, it may be feasible to use SelectIonBoxes, but that won’t be true in every case. I suspect that place is not GPU bottlenecked either way and some thing else is slowing it down. If the place is GPU bottlenecked, you can get this:

50fps down to 15fps for the exact same veiw.

4 Likes

Interesting tech demo; yes, selection boxes are not a catch-all. However, from my tests, they will work fine for most games and most users.

I suggest that developers who rely on outlines try and test selection boxes to see if it is feasable for their game.

That’s fine, and SelectionBoxes still may indeed still be performant enough in some cases. It’s just that claiming that there is a “negligible performance difference between outlines and selection boxes.” is very wrong.

5 Likes

25,000 Users agree to keep outlines and they still removed it, i know its nothing compared to the disable vote, but its still 25,000 users.
image

2 Likes

It’s game sessions that have outlines enabled/disabled, not votes from users.

1 Like

You know, decals are far more likely to cause lags than outlines.

I haven’t seen anyone realize the strain that more object that especially deal with the render system, cause. Decals cover sides, not just edges, and with them being differently above the block according to size, its possibly the worst way to create symmetric outlines.

Anyone continuing to mention the creation of more objects, such as decals or selection boxes, causes far more problems with lag. Outlines were used literally when the windows operating system had Roblox widely used under Windows XP. The devices from then could handle outlines, and there shouldn’t be an excuse for lag when the simplest of machines could run Roblox when all places had outlines automatically enabled.

However with assets, roblox has to load items from the website, which make new stored entries of photos, meshes, and audio. ROBLOX can store megabytes in audio if uploaded with high bitrate from sources other than youtube and SoundCloud. YouTube and SoundCloud audio would also take megabytes for a partial song thats about 1 minute. Photos can take kilobytes of data at max size for roblox. And meshes take a good amount of data I’d assume.

With this in mind, a simple line wouldn’t take a kilobyte, or a megabyte, it would certainly take bytes. The thinking of datasize in this perspective is widely considered in a wrong fashion throughout this forum.

I also don’t understand what the forum means about 20-30 thousand places only having outlines, they were automatically enabled to new places for years, even after build mode was gone. If you mean after, after if all were turned off somehow, then your numbers would be under 40k, not in the millions before if there was a switch. I can say the baseplate heavily used outlines, which had to mainly make blocks with smooth surfaces to make them disabled, in my continuous development experience since 2012.

I hope you guys all take this to good thought, and understand what I mean. This is a controversial topic which is very important to some and relaxed for others. Hope this helps give some insight.

EDIT:
Corrected grammar.

EDIT:
Corrected grammar x2. Final Edit.

4 Likes