As a Roblox developer, it is currently cumbersome to make pixel art and low-fidelity style games. Recently, ImageObjects such as ImageLabels and ImageButtons recieved the new property to set their resample mode to pixelated. Right now, the only way to have a similar effect on textures and materials is to upscale the pixel art up to 1024x1024 to get sharp edges. However, these are still not sharp when you zoom in on them, and they also take up much more memory.
For example, minecraft blocks use 16x16 textures. To get a similar effect in Roblox with as close as possible results, you would have to make them 1024x1024, using up to 4096x more data (not taking into account compression). This adds up very fast for pixel art games, reducing the performance and increasing load times.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve our development experience for pixel art and low fidelity games, as well as increase their performance on all platforms, reduce load times, and reduce data footprint and networking strain on Roblox.
If image labels and image buttons have it, I don’t understand why decals/textures don’t have such an option. This would really help with pixelarts and other low-resolution stuff as you mentioned.
Having resampling in general would be really helpful for games relying on pixel arts (we could also have 2x2 checker textures or other extremely small repetitive patterns that dont require much resolution to replicate)
Huge support. Memory is a huge limitation for Roblox in general. This has been a highly requested feature for years.
People are currently using work arounds that significantly impact memory, like adding hundreds of extra faces and using unnecessarily large textures like preacher_online mentioned.
What a waste!
Different texture sampling modes would allow for games that are very memory efficient, new game aesthetics, and easier modeling (using softwares like block bench).
Considering there are so many instances in need of this, I wonder if it would be a good idea to add a dedicated image instance which consolidates all the image related properties into one (ResampleMode, ImageColor, ImageAssetId etc), that could then be used by other instances as a replacement for an image id.
here are 2 images i made. one is 16x16 and the other is 64x64, and they both use very few colors. theres no need to compress them at all, yet i have to use imagelabels (which dont wrap onto shapes) to fix the very bad compression.
I can’t stand how Roblox keeps withholding these essential features for no apparent reason. Why do I need a 1024p texture just to somewhat resemble a 128p texture? It’s stupid. Because the geniuses at Roblox didn’t implement something like this earlier in development, we now have a situation where there are numerous instances supporting images such as decals, textures, tools, mesh parts, particle emitters, etc. I doubt there’s a universally good solution for all of these.
And given Roblox’s current approach of ignoring developers and focusing on investors, I doubt we’ll ever see something like this in a timely manner.
i dont think it would reduce storage on their servers since imagelabels arent compressed which means their servers save the exact un-compressed image. idk why the client gets a compressed version of the image, since the textures are (i think) immediately deleted after leaving the game, so lowering the size of the image can’t be that beneficial, especially since the compression doesn’t look like it reduces file size that much
Ohhh now you got me thinking.
Roblox may not be actually compresses the images that are uploaded but the images that are loaded in game.
So quick explanation, graphics cards have very small and limited amounts of memory and storing uncompressed data in their memory consumes lots of space.
So what a lotta game engines do is they use something whiiiiich I think is called… DXT compression?
(Because algorithms like PNG and JPEG compression are WAYYYYYYY too slow and can’t run on the GPU due to how GPUs are designed.)
It’s basically a way of compressing images that breaks them up into little chunks/blocks that are each individually compressed on the graphics card and the algorithm that is typically used is VERY fast and relatively efficient but comes at the cost of slightly lower image quality.
This makes it so games use less graphics memory and can load more complex textures and models.
I think here you can see how different texture compression methods affect details in different ways.
