What do you mean?
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I hate how everyone’s just saying, “SelectionBoxes are a perfect alternative!” when they clearly aren’t. SelectionBox outlines get thicker the further your Camera is from it, and they also have a much higher performance burden compared to Outlines. I really hope we can get an actual alternative to Outlines.
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Not decals or textures.
In the old days when building games were the jam, the hopperbin building tools that Roblox provided would hide studs locally when the tool was put away, and show the studs when the tool was equipped.
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You also didn’t mention that they don’t work with shadows (example is somewhere in my post), making them 200% a bad alternative in games where (Outdoor)Ambient is different from sunlight (almost all games).
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Yeah, also how they were an accessibility feature, as they helped players distinguish between blocks easier. Roblox’s removal of Outlines was also an ableist move. People with slight visual impairments have been complaining about this as well, saying that it was harder for them to build without Outlines.
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Huh, funny you mentioned! I actually have a customizable outliner plugin that makes use of SelectionBoxes
I reckon roblox should just have an outline or stroke property that’s customisable for any BaseParts.
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They plan to add a wireframe mode, I believe that is what will replace outlines.
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You can use the torso mesh via naming and grouping and adding a humanoid and simulate bevels there btw
I ran the experiment on the Suburban template, which is quite laggy for me. I’m not sure if this is intended behaviour, but turning outlines on did the opposite thing…
Just like previous time, on the left - outlines off, middle - lag while toggling, on the right - outlines on.
@zeuxcg analysis pls
This is quite a cool idea, but the problem is that mesh doesn’t scale correctly (some edges will have different angle than others, difference is bigger on bigger parts) and that studs don’t show up on humanoids (this is bad for games with nostalgic style). Plus I’m afraid that enough humanoids will explode computer.
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Actually no clue why that would happen. That’s one for someone who’s actually on the rendering team.
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For anyone on rendering team (specially @zeuxcg ), here's more info on this anomaly:
Viewpoint:
Graphics settings:
GPU and Windows version:
Render information when outlines are disabled (laggy):
Render information when outlines are enabled (bit faster):
Microprofiler when outlines are enabled:
When disabled:
Outlines on:
Outlines off (take a look at 2x increased parts count):
Still though, we got absolutely no replacement, despite the words. Will we ever get one? Or we won’t because Adopt Me won’t utilize it?
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Great work! I absolutely agree that we need an alternative. I used to use Outlines for building until they got removed. Right now, all the alternatives suck, and we absolutely deserve something better.
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@rachjumper, I wouldn’t find that a good alternative. The outlines should be up still even if they are deprecated. Some deprecated things still can be useful, but not much though. Still the outlines may be useful.
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Touching up on an old subject about the LineHandleAdornment object.
An old forum post explaining that the object isn’t altered in rendering.
A post in this forum topic.
These posts shows extremely promising replication of outlines in studio. It is also related to PlayerGui manipulation, but also directly server wide. I tried it out months ago, and LineHandleAdornments are closest rendering alternative to what Outlines were, but I’m not sure how they hold up in masses.
There isn’t a lot of good documentation on how to work with them, but people have been able to give people on help on how to use them on the DevForum.
What would be wonderful, is a plugin that utilizes these objects, and makes it work everywhere.
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That looks amazing. Absolutely amazing.
Oh also. Not to like make you do work for this, but just want to put this in this post and let you hear it, too.
There’s also an object called CylinderHandleAdorment. This might not be possible, but I wonder if used in the PlayerGui, it can spin according to perspective locally. Maybe sphere outlines could work that way. I want to try scripting with these objects later.
If to say a CylinderHandleAdornment was offset to where the circle edges met the circumference of a sphere… It could work, if it always faced you, locally.
I’ll try messing around with HandleAdornents today.
EDIT: Grammar fix.
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Would you mind sharing your demo script for the LineHandleAdornments?
Even if it isn’t perfect, it looks promising.
Im not home right now, i’ll look for you once im home.
I was hoping for someone to make a fully functional more efficient module script to create this ourselves instead…
Nobody apparantly did sadly.
These HandleAdornment’s could be extremely laggy if you use too many of them. (5000+ i think, i dont remember the score from my benchmark anymore…)