We are planning to release a new set of UGC validation rules for caging layered clothing accessories aimed at stopping broken cage setups that negatively impact gameplay from being published to the Marketplace.
Many developers have reported players wearing accessories that are either too large, too small, or enable partially invisible avatars in their experiences. After a comprehensive investigation we have identified the root cause of most of the issues being improperly set up cages.
The new cage validation checks include:
Validation
Description
Gameplay Effect
1
Cage mesh distance
Outer cage modeled too far away from the asset mesh
Accessories layered on top are deformed to gigantic proportions
2
Cage UV malformed
Incorrect UV mapping corrupts the inner-to-outer cage deformation transfer
Accessories layered on top “explode” away from the avatar
3
Asset mesh outside of outer cage
Most of the asset mesh is modeled outside of the outer cage
Enables the creation of “orbiting” accessories that follow the avatar
4
Cage relevancy
Outer cage does not envelop a significant part of the asset mesh
Enables partially or fully invisible avatars
5
Coplanar overlapping triangles
Asset mesh modeled with multiple faces overlapping
Drags down gameplay performance for all players
6
Cage similarity
Parts of the body cage have all of its vertices collapsed to a point or small region
Enables partially or fully invisible avatars
We acknowledge cage set up is not straightforward and we are working on ways to reduce or eliminate the main pain points for you, our creators.
In This Announcement
We are releasing a comprehensive guide on best practices to create cages. These include hints to help you troubleshoot the most common issues found, based on the types of caged assets that have been failing validation recently.
We are also updating our validation messages to provide clear and actionable feedback to help you fix the issues until we have an automated system in place that will do all the fixing for you.
Looking Ahead
We are working on a new validation system to automatically fix caging issues for you. We plan to expand our Avatar Auto-Setup product to auto-fix body and accessory caging issues even when these assets are created outside of Studio.
You can expect these changes in Spring 2025 when we start enforcing the new cage validation rules.
Your feedback is very important for us to continue refining our validation rules to support great gameplay experiences for our players while still enabling a wide range of creative freedom to our developers to produce high-quality content.
Items that make you practically or completely invisible, as well as those that make you absolutely huge have been plagueging the catalog for way too long, and causing heaps of frustration for top devs. These changes are awesome and should help clean up a lot of the clutter in the best-selling category right now keep it up, team!
Since this is a slower transition, is there going to be any better report flows for items that are disruptive to experiences today?
This has been a guideline under marketplace policy for years, and there should be more increased efforts in enforcing violative content in the near term
it seems reporting the item directly on the marketplace has historically not resulted in takedowns for certain guidelines including disruptive items
edit:
This also does not mention disruptive oversized back accessories with their 10x7x4 bounding box
Great update in many aspects! It’s good that checks will be added in order to squash out invisible bodies. However, these updates seemingly will remove the ability to make popular “handheld” accessories.
I think it’d be unfortunate to completely remove the ability to make handheld items entirely, can we expect a new dedicated category that allows for the creation of these types of items?
Are there any plans to officially support holdable items as accessories? Holdables are very popular and beloved by the community. However, they are only made possible through Layered Clothing. This change will impact the creation of these accessories and it most likely won’t be possible anymore.
Glad to hear about this update. Accessories have been a bit too over-the-top for too long now. Will these changes apply retroactively, i.e. to accessories published before Spring 2025?
It’s nice to see some changes being done, however, I got 2 questions:
Will some items stay in the catalog that were uploaded prior to this change? eg: items that hae the outer and inner cages same size, but they don’t make your avatar too big or invisible
Will we get some official support for holdable items? This change might impact creation of handheld items, will there be an official support for those, as well as other types, such as “non-dynamic head/face”, & shoes?
99% sure purges will be done to catch rule-breaking items uploaded prior to the release of the validation patches. They’ve done this in the past and it’s more than likely to happen again
This is already something that exists as layered clothing and it works just fine. Making it an official accessory type would increase developer control on whether or not they want to support holdable accessories. This category would also open up possibilities to have bracelets, watches, etc. These accessories are not possible to make without uploading it to the wrong category ie. shirts.
I’m concerned about this change effecting certain accessories, specifically point 3 combined with floor length skirts.
It is not reasonable to expect devs to stretch the legs of the cage around long floor length skirts, especially ones with a lot of volume. I tried that on my first ballgowns, and the result was 1. it took forever and never really ended up looking correct and 2. when people layered suits over the skirts they made the outer accessory huge. If anyone remembers the whole bear suit + ball gown exploit, this is why that happened. One of my items was popular for this reason.
Since then I have started to NOT expand the legs out to meet the skirt on full length dresses, only down the waist and a bit of the thighs so that jackets layer properly.
Because these skirts are mostly outside the cage mesh, point 3 will likely apply to them. This means long dresses will become impossible to add to the platform. This is a change that will negatively effect feminine presenting players.
Fwiw if Roblox officially supported handheld accessories and clothing, and surfaced the category through API, this wouldn’t be an issue. Devs could just turn off the clothing as part of their tool handle code, or this could happen automatically on Roblox’s end by default.
I understand that this update is aiming to stop malicious, game-breaking products from entering the marketplace, but it seems to simultaneously be harming certain original, unique creations.
The specific validation that is worrisome to me is #3, asset mesh outside of outer cage. There are some unique or larger items that putting this validation in place would break/throttle. This includes full-body animal suits, tails, wings, dresses, handheld items, etc.
How does Roblox plan to mitigate this, or will creators have to deal with the consequences?
Between this and the experience discoverability update, I’m glad you’re taking steps to reduce the amount of low quality content on the platform. Now, if something more proactive could be done about the inappropriate accessories flooding the marketplace, that’d be great
I agree with everything but the coplanar overlapping triangles, the maximum amount of tris per ugc item is 4k and overlapped or not it should function the same as 4k. Its been pretty useful for things that need to be very thin, but also need to be filled in on the other side for aesthetic purposes.
For example, i use coplanar triangles for the ends of the skirt and add a cap above it so it can have the HSR to work properly but it doesnt look like a thick clump either
There is a double sided property you can enable but double sided property does not show up on thumbnails of items so i never used it
keep it up, team!
