The recent changes to Roblox have broken Vulkan Layers and are no longer loaded by the client. We are not entirely sure why, as it does not pose a security risk—you cannot create an overlay within Roblox itself, and you do not have to write to any memory or create hooks. Each layer must be code-signed. This breaks things like OBS Game Capture, which previously worked on Vulkan for Roblox and simply intercepts swap chain images. Vulkan only exposes graphical information to the layers and nothing else. It is something officially supported by the Vulkan spec, so we’re unsure why this change was made, given that it does not require writing to Roblox’s memory and each layer in it needs to be code-signed.
Another change Roblox has made was the recent allowance of renaming RobloxPlayerBeta.exe. This directly affects the usage of NVIDIA Ansel, as previous methods required changing the application name to make it compatible because of unofficial support by NVIDIA. This does not pose a security risk because NVIDIA Ansel is part of the Display Driver.
Currently, we are more concerned about Vulkan Layers being restricted, as they are unable to load at all, even when code-signed. We are hopeful that these changes are temporary, but we are looking for reassurance. We had a previous post here that discussed this, and we got no official response on the DevForum. These changes were temporarily removed after our post, but it seems to be back right in time for the release of The Hunt: MEGA Edition. Hopefully, this is a temporary change, as the software is very beneficial to content creators and users on the platform. It has even been featured in videos by the largest Star Creators and on Roblox’s TikTok and Instagram.
We are way more concerned about the Vulkan Layers, however. We are currently developing a cross-platform solution to allow all users to access shaders on Roblox, and we chose Vulkan because we did not have to write hooks specifically or write to Roblox’s memory. This is also why we had to make sure that our code was code-signed. We did this with security in mind. It is something that has been in development for over six months, and it would be extremely unfortunate if these changes are not temporary, especially since there was no notice by Roblox that this was going to occur. We developed it in this manner because we are trying to maintain the security of the platform. The Vulkan layer we are developing is very similar to how OBS Game Capture would function, and that worked before the update that was released within the past 24 hours. This update has broken both our Vulkan layer and other Vulkan extensions, all of which are code-signed.
We are looking for reassurance that this can be tackled in a positive way. Vulkan Layers are quite complicated, and I don’t think there’s any room for abuse. They were used by legitimate software and aren’t something that could necessarily be abused due to the architecture and the Vulkan interface. Roblox also makes it a requirement that everything is code-signed, ensuring a very highly vetted barrier of entry. It’s very unlikely Roblox has ever seen abuse of Vulkan layers or will ever see it being abused. I am writing this post for the developer due to him not having DevForum access. Thank you for reading this post, and I hope an official statement can be formed on this.
I’m not super into the development of shaders and stuff, so the shader stuff isn’t important. But the fact that this breaks OBS is heartbreaking to me, I use OBS to record a lot of things so the fact that it is broken now is making me concerned for the future of this platform.
Now more than ever I’m really hoping an admin or someone at least responds, before I was hopeful with other methods being worked on to keep shaders alive, but now they’ve completely killed off the shader community as a whole.
There are games I only play with shaders to give more atmosphere so I’m praying there’s still a chance they’ll actually listen and help prevent breaking functionality for shaders for good this time.
Now I understand if they’ve done this for The Hunt, but removing access for the Vulcan Rendering API is a tad ridiculous, I would like to mention that most exploits/Executors STILL work, even after the update that was made for what I would assume to stop cheaters at all cost, it ended up making these changes useless and just hitting the gut of a community that was pretty prominent for over a year at this point.
You can move this post to #development-discussion, #feature-requests:engine-features or #feature-requests if you want any luck on getting Roblox’s attention unless they come directly from the announcement. They’re also more probably appropriate for this post, or in #bug-reports as the comment below mine said, even tho this isn’t much of a “bug”.
Outside of that I am very disappointed, not only did they kill shader development, but also OBS, which many used to record.
You are unlikely to get a response in the #help-and-feedback categories, they aren’t actively monitored because they usually aren’t relevant to the engineering teams. You could try posting a bug report, you’re more likely to get an official response with those.
Please fix this, this is an extremely important part of my development as it helps make advertising games easier by allowing better and clearer photos. This is also something I have done to help out small communities by helping them with advertising.
I would suggest this is moved to bug reports or feature request as it will be seen by more Roblox engineers.
Roblox to this day still miserably fails to make an actual good anti cheat yet again. Not to mention how would YouTubers even record the hunt without OBS?
So its only obs game capture. Features like Display capture, and window capture still works. But its still a problem since game capture is quite important for a lot of software like clipping programs (I believe not 100% sure tho)
Update windows capture was working but false alarm. For some odd reason when I do the Microsoft version of Roblox and Windows capture, it some times works but over all no. So we just have to see