I was revisiting some of my original creations the other day, and I was sad when I learned that now it no longer takes ROBLOX Studio to convert terrain to smooth; it’s done in the PlayerBeta now. Even though this has little practical use, it would be nice to have a way to revisit the old terrain in-game. Going back to the days of personal servers and group building would be fun. Studio doesn’t really need to support this, because it’s not worth the effort to maintain when new games won’t necessarily have it, but for some of the older games broken by this update, it would be nice to see it back.
As far as practical use goes, the old terrain is surprisingly very useful for making things like quick elevation adjustment, or particularly trenches. I actually plan on building my trenches in the old terrain, then converting to smooth & modifying them when I finish. This will allow for a precision job that gives players a level ground to run around on.
Hopefully this gets somewhere, though not everybody has a need for building trenches, or any terrain interaction at all necessarily, but it would be very nice to see my old creations the way they were back when I built them.
Maintaining two whole terrain systems isn’t optimal, as they would need to support and test in case on randomly starts crashing or having unforeseen issues.
They wouldn’t necessarily need to be maintained, just available. If a user wanted to risk using it and something bad happens, that would be their problem.
Maintenance isn’t only for making sure the feature doesn’t damage places – it’s also for making sure it continues to work. What would happen if Roblox supported old terrain and then two weeks later an unrelated change broke it? They’d have to fix it to support your needs.
This is a really odd use case, so it’s unlikely Roblox would ever do anything about it. IMO a better solution would be to download an older build of Studio where old terrain was still supported and open up the places that way if you want to view them for nostalgia’s sake.
This is what I’ve been doing, though I was actually using it to build with the terrain. It’s a lot easier to build some structures using the old terrain than the new terrain in some cases. (RIP SmoothBlockModel)