This is already a great suggestion because of what everyone’s already said above, but I wanted to add on another use case that I’ve run into where the lack of this feature is actually pretty detrimental to game performance:
One of the last remaining uses for specialmeshes is to use colors above the Color3 value for the texture. Doing so makes it neon, which is otherwise impossible for a textured mesh.
As an example, you can do the following:
Create a transparent part
Create an inverted sphere mesh inside the part
Create a decal inside the part and set the texture
Set the decal’s Color3 to something above 255
Then, you get something like this:
(if anyone working on this needs a rbxm example, DM me and I’m happy to help!)
& the thing is: decals inside transparent parts is crazy inefficient. Normally, you’d use a meshpart + surfaceappearance + alphamode, but because this feature isn’t there, that’s not an option here.
I don’t know the exact amount & haven’t done any extensive benchmarking or anything, but it seems worse by maybe about 5x. That’s enough to be the single biggest performance issue for any game that does this extensively and may be the thing that prevents it from running well on some lower-end devices. It’s not an issue that every game has but it’s common among some of the bigger combat games on the site, & for those it would be incredibly beneficial.
We just want you to communicate your planned things with us, make a page of planned features, please. It’s tiring not knowing what roblox planned, and what it doesn’t plan.
It is insanely inefficient, hard on memory, and TIME-CONSUMING to have to reupload several textures in different colors for just one SurfaceAppearance. This is absolutely one of my biggest problems with utilizing PBR and SurfaceAppearances and it’s annoying that Roblox only acknowledged it after 2 years. Not only that, but they also then proceeded to go silent on the issue for (what is now) 5 months… for just changing the color of a texture. Come on.
My game has items that can be crafted out of arbitrary ingame materials. I need them to have textures (in this case a UV mapped peanut). I currently need to use a textureless SpecialMesh with a Decal on top for the texture so that the base part can be recolored based on whether they’re made of gold, bronze, etc. I’d like to use SurfaceAppearance instead for its PBR capabilities.
The Material Manager ignores meshes’ UVs. Material Manager also does not have transparency. But Material Manager can change color. Surface Appearance needs to have color.
Why have two different texturing systems and exclude features from them, it makes no sense.
The initial post requesting this feature was on November 2020 and the first signs of Roblox caring is on January 2022.
It took 1 year, 2 months, and 10 days for Roblox to notice tyridge77’s post. From CountLoop’s post sending the feature request to the engine team is still ongoing and from this date has took 1 year, 3 months, and 30 days.
It has been 2 years, 6 months, and 9 days, still nothing. Tyridge77’s request is completely reasonable. This is a feature THAT ALREADY EXISTS in material manager.
heres a DeliciousBakedPie / Tinfoilbot inspired bush texture i made. #1 shows the default coloring, #2 shows it at (0, 255, 0) and #3 shows it at (255, 384, 0)
the bush texture was originally for an alien planet which is why it’s BROWN, but i wanted to use the texture for a HUMAN planet called “earth” where plants are usually GREEN. but i cant make the plant GREEN and look good without the out of bounds numbers or whatever you’d call them
~?~?~?~?~?~?~?~?~
TEMPORARY WORKAROUND: you can put decals on the surfaceappearances, but it doesn’t work with the backs of triangles on DoubleSided meshes, which means you need 2x as many triangles (not good, but also not a lot for my 4 triangle mesh. it would also need 2x as many decals). also, it only works here because my mesh matches the UV mapping of a decal.
(left is MeshPart with SurfaceAppearance and a Decal, right is 2 parts in a cross shape, but the decals do the weird transparent object layering thing which looks awful)
Any updates on when this is being added? I need this right now. The life of everyone around me depends on this. My grind is interrupted by this mishap.
In conclusion, I would just like to know when you guys are adding my feature.
Had to jump back to this post after reading about staff’s perspective of feature requests in this update.
I strongly urge someone to up the priority of this feature or provide some more info on whether it’s being worked on. Beyond making development easier, this feature would make monetization of so many games that much easier. It has been requested for over half a decade, and while I understand that some features prove to be highly difficult to implement, I cannot actually think of any other singular feature that would more directly lead to increased income.
Customized cosmetics is lifeblood of successful monetization. This feature would make it that much easier for developers to let players purchase cosmetics in their games.
Want to implement colorable trees for different seasons. Current solution would be to use premade surfaceappearances, and add them in. Causing an instant ‘pop’ effect, but atleast it would work.
Recolorable SurfaceAppearances would make this task trivial. Would even allow us to smoothly fade the color.
After nearly 3 years, there has to be a reason why this hasn’t been implemented yet. Atleast tell us why.
Too much work? Platform support issues?
Here’s a post requesting what is essentially the same feature, made in 2017. This has been in demand for around six years. I firmly believe this feature has gone unacknowledged for far too long. Hopefully we hear something before the end of the year.
