Ever since Clouds were added to Roblox, they carried with them a warning system which I find to be extremely unnecessary, frustrating, and inconsistent with all other Roblox instance types.
When Clouds are parented to anywhere other than game.Workspace.Terrain, they provide this warning message in the console:
This warning informs us (the developer) that the Clouds wont render or take effect as they’re not parented to Terrain. While I understand that it is important for developers to get insight as to why things are not working as intended, I believe this solution is harmful. I say this because it is extremely common practice for Clouds to be created as part of maps or areas in a game, and parented to those areas until they need to be loaded.
A simple example could be a shooter game, where the developer has multiple maps in ServerStorage. These maps are then cloned to the workspace, and a script takes their associated visual effects (lighting instances, clouds, etc) and parents them to the right locations. A picture below to illustrate how this could be done.
For all Lighting instances, such as ColorCorrection, Blur, Sun Rays, etc. We don’t get warnings for parenting them to the wrong spot. I don’t see the reason why Clouds need to be an exception to that rule.
Look at all these incorrectly parented instances! But only the Clouds are giving us a Warning.
There is also a warning for multiple instances of Clouds being parented to Terrain, which is just not nessasary.
This same logic applies to Atmosphere instances and Skyboxes, but there is no warning logged for those.
To make matters worse, these warnings appear every time a server runs, which can ramp up EXTREMELY quickly in larger games. In the past 7 days, my experience has had almost 50,000 warnings related to Clouds, as it uses a map-loading system similar to the one I detailed before.
In short, this seems like incredibly redundant behavior, which is inconsistent with other instance types, and I believe the warnings should be removed. Roblox has demonstrated that they remove unnecessary warnings in the past, as seen by this change being deployed recently:
To reproduce this issue:
- Add an instance of Clouds to the workspace
- Observe warning in console
- Reparent Clouds to ServerStorage
- Observe warning in console
- Parent Clouds to Terrain and add a second instance of Clouds to Terrain
- Observe warning in console
Bonus Points: - With the two Clouds in Terrain, add a third instance of Clouds to ServerStorage and observe as the “don’t have more than 2 cloud instances” warning is repeated, along with yet another cloud parent warning.
Why Clouds man? Of all things?? Is it because they weirdly need to be parented to Terrain? We have an API Reference for that!