Smooth Terrain Heightmap/Colormap Importer Release!

Has this been disabled? I opened up studio to test this out today and I have no Import tab under the terrain editor… could it be that studio has not updated correctly or what?

The feature is currently disabled.

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Alright gotcha. I knew they would’ve posted it here if they disabled it, but I didn’t have time to read all 144 replies :wink:

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Protip:

image

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Maybe it’s time Roblox looked into upgrading the compression and storage on images. We need to be able to upload larger images.

I know Google is a big company who can afford to do it, and they process our photos for other services (AI training, for example), but they offer free unlimited storage on Google Photos. Perhaps Roblox need to look into ways they can do this too to allow for larger, higher quality textures and images.

Allowing .svg files (or similar) would be a good start – certainly these would be useful for UI design, and no loss of quality when scaled. They also take a very small amount of storage when compared to other image formats.


Comparison of file size of the same image in different file formats.

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Last I heard rasterizing SVG was nontrivial and rather expensive, hence why we don’t have in-game support for it.


This tool should not be taking exclusively uploaded images. Requiring heightmaps be moderated is redundant, introducing problem after problem for legitimate developers (limited size, waiting for moderation, heightmap is now public, tedium and hassle of uploading…).

Places and place thumbnails are already moderated. Inappropriate games are out there and will be out there whether you like it or not. If this tool requires uploaded assets, developers will just build one that doesn’t, and carry on their merry way uploading places with rude pictures drawn in the dirt.

I will not use a tool that unnecessarily cripples its own potential, and my workflow.

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Since when is JPEG larger than a PNG? Almost all of my screenshots that I encode in GIMP when trying to preserve a close quality are half the size in JPEG (if not less).

Yeah, I know the quality loss and no alpha support, so don’t give me a lesson about that. But for textures that don’t require high quality or transparency like billboards which could also use compression as a style, JPEG seems like a good idea.

Well, it’s just a picture I found on Google. concentrating more on SVG vs PNG here, as both support alpha. presumably their JPEG file is 100% quality and not compressed well

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Does SVG need to be rasterised? Surely native SVG support could be implemented, as long as the engine knows when it pulls the asset from the server what the file type is

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This was declined because SVG is too expensive and complex. Fundamentally SVG needs to be rasterized to be rendered. Rasterization is the process of converting the vector image to pixels.

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Expensive for what? Almost every modern webpage runs vector graphics, be it fonts or icons (most of the icons in devforum are vector based).
Rasterizing vector images is not a very expensive process, but still shouldn’t be overdone. Roblox could easily overcome this issue by rasterizing an image when it’s assigned to an instance and treat it as a raster from that point on.

Lets also not forget that SVGs are almost always simple icons as they have little use in realistic images.

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Did you read the post?
Modern webpages do not render 60 times per second. You cannot pre-rasterize SVG if you expect the image to scale dynamically at runtime and remain sharp, and if you do pre-rasterize once to some in-memory texture, where do you draw the line for size? Too large and you’re wasting memory (which is very critical on mobile devices), but too small and there is no benefit to developers.

This is offtopic and has already been declined by staff in the past. Do not debate this issue here please.

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We did it first :wink:

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That’s not how encryption or copylocking work. Additionally, I can’t really see what issue you’re trying to solve here; mind clearing that up?

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Well, I did say I am no Php wizard! But, my thought was that you can use Php to encrypt passwords, so since the asset ID is just a string of numbers; you could use Php to encrypt the ID and place it elsewhere for the the content holder’s eyes only. I am mostly referring to some comments up thread.

I don’t really understand why this has to use Roblox image assets at all. You should just be able to use local files. There is literally no reason I can possibly think of for it to be uploaded

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When will this be activated again?

Any reason why i can’t find it here?

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The feature was disabled temporarily due to some problems that had appeared

Please read posts above you before you post.

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Reading 164 posts isn’t too practical, also that was posted a month ago. Evan was probably implying an update on the situation.

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