It’s incredibly sad that it’s been over 7 years and nothing has been done about this. It makes some of the textures in our game look like spaghetti.
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I think we’re just gonna have to accept that stuff like 4K textures won’t be a thing for decades since the Roblox platform has no desire to be more realistic tbh.
They don’t really benefit from that since at least 80% of their userbase are players who use mobile devices or low-end computers like I do and it would only cause more problems like constant lagging or crashing.
So in the end, not being able to have the texture quality you want is just one of the costs of being a Roblox developer sadly.
We can get free tools and servers from them so that our projects can be made possible, but we also have to work with their limitations and restrictions in exchange as a result.
I personally think that developers should have more control over what they want to make, but I can also see why Roblox just doesn’t want any games to be Playstation 5 quality.
It’s like asking Bethesda why they keep using the same game engine from 2003, it all simply has to do with cost-saving along with the fact that higher graphics won’t improve how much profit they gain.
In the end, the whole concept of realism just doesn’t sound like something that’ll be worth putting in the time and money from Roblox’s point of view, so they’ll most likely stay silent about this for another decade or two instead.
I don’t think that Roblox doesn’t want realism.
Roblox has contiuously tried to add more realism to the platform, such as with Future Lighting and half volumetric clouds.
They definitely try to make more realistic stuff, and I don’t think it’s a matter of decades before we will see more advanced features and visual effects that improve the looks of games.
We can’t be stuck with 2013 graphics forever, and Roblox has to realize that at some point, and stop throwing good things out of the window just because of mobile users.
And roblox really lacks behind the industry-standard when it comes to graphics, we are just starting to see things that have been a thing since 2019, and it’s 2023, so come on.
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Actually, realistic graphics have existed for longer than 2019.
The game Prey, which is a game from 2006 already used PBR materials, bump/normal maps and whatnot.
Realistic graphics were already possible in 2006.
Now I must admit that Prey was really ahead of it’s time but this still goes to show how far behind Roblox really is.
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I mean, there’s no denying that they’re slowly adding in features and semi-realistic content in order to make every game look more polished.
But regardless, it’s simply just easier and cheaper for them to basically keep the game engine looking almost the exact same as it was before with only minimal improvements every once in a while.
The reason we’re seeing updates like these go at a snail’s pace is because of the fact that there’s really not that much reason for them to make updates that’ll go beyond the game engine’s limitations.
And kind of realism everybody here wants would basically require Roblox to do a complete overhaul of their game engine, which would be very expensive and could even affect every game in the progress.
It could even have a negative effect on most of the playerbase, since more than 80% of them can’t handle high quality graphics.
There’s just a lot of high costs and very heavy risk involved when trying to explore the concept of having better quality in projects, so I can see why they’re trying to go as slowly as possible.
It might mean that we won’t see basic things like glass reflections or stable car physics for at least another 5 years, but that’s just the way they work sadly.
I’m sure we’ll get 4K textures eventually, but we may not see that kind of thing until 2035 or 2040, but 2K textures could release a lot sooner though…which is something I guess.
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Wow, I knew Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) used normal maps etc. but this looks pretty great for a in-2006 released game.
Which isn’t a bad thing. This engine is so old, it’s falling apart. We’re seeing it with the outages, and it’s showing that roblox’s engine is outdated. It’s about time they refresh the engine, and yes I realize that it’s not an easy task, but something that must be done in order for roblox to advance.
Reworking things like humanoids and how they are handled could drastically improve performance for everyone, and so with many other things.
Roblox has made a total revenue of 2.2 Billion USD in 2022, money is definitely not an issue, they have more than enough resources to fund a project like this.
There is a lot of money and risk involved in anything that can improve things, like going to the moon or developing the automobile and whatnot.
In the end, It’s disappointing that Roblox isn’t up to date with the industry-standard because of mobile players (not blaming them, that’s just the biggest downside of a mobile phone), and throwing so many useful and genuinely good features out of the window.
But there really isn’t much we can do other than ask roblox to add these things 
Yup, you’re right about that! 
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Yeah, no, we need this. I understand that people are worried it will run worse on lower end devices, but whose to say it will render at 2k/4k on every single device? Why not give us an option to render it at a lower quality if the users’ graphics settings are low? Plus, we can just render textures at a lower resolution the further away they are from the camera (if that’s not already a thing here).
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Going to have to bump this. SurfaceAppearance looks good on paper, but for bigger meshes it’s simply ugly (or in extreme cases not worth it) because the textures are wayyy to small.
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Up maximum mesh triangles whilst you’re at it!
(bump)
edit:
A possible solution could be including (optional) download links to the full quality games assets in the games description to increase poly count and texture size and quality.
These could then be set in a localscript if they are detected in the Roblox textures folder.
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Bump. Would love to have better looking games, 4k textures would definitely help with making Roblox a more widely used game engine.
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Bump! We’re currently working on a realistic shooter for 17+ inspired by Hell Let Loose. The current 1k texture limit is forcing us to choose between our characters looking like they are made out of plastic or having ugly UV seams.
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This gives me an idea. Why can’t we use vectors as textures? Much more performance friendly and they take up less space than PNGs.
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If I recall correctly during an RDC 2019 Q&A they stated there’d be some issues or challenges with properly displaying vector based content in the context of Roblox but it was something that they were possibly looking into long-term.
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This could probably be solved by having a “Texture Quality” setting directly under “Graphics Level”.
The lowest probably being the current or a bit lower, and the highest being 4K.
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I saw staff respond to that one badge re-arrange request. You know what that means. BUMP til the day i die. This is slowly becoming a problem for us.
If worried about performance, i dunno, make a texture quality setting like (probably) EVERY other game ever?
Roblox already has dynamic texture resolutions. They will lower the further you are away from it.
But I’m sure the feature didn’t exist in 2016, when this post was created.
Bumping, tired of pandering to this engine’s shortcomings…
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If the problem is storage, it could be designed so that the high resolution version is “temporary”. It could be deleted if it goes unused for a year or two or based on some other metric like how many images the user uploaded and whether they support the platform through their creations or spending habits. After this nothing would break because the low resolution version would still be there.
If the problem is asset delivery, similar metrics could be used to prioritize delivery for places or users. It would be nice if all places and users would get full quality, but I’m open to compromises like this if this is what’s holding the platform back.
We can achieve pretty-good texture resolution for characters at 1024x1024, but it requires separating meshes into multiple pieces and being meticulous with UV layouts. Material textures have different requirements because of tiling behaviors, and would benefit from 2K or 4K.
The biggest limitation is that we can’t layer multiple recolorable PBR maps on MeshParts in a way that respects the UV layout (decals don’t work for this), but that’s a different feature.
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Would be easier if Roblox made you download games so you wouldn’t fully require solely internet to play, it would also make people think further about what games they wanna play so they’d be more likely to play quality games instead of suspicious obby games.
Currently, you can upload 4k images to Roblox and then REDOWNLOAD them at the same resolution? So what’s going on here? I think Roblox just doesn’t let you load 4k images as it already uses a lot of RAM to run for some whatever reason? Maybe memory leak but idk. However, 4k images get down sampled to 1024x1024 which is better than uploading 1024x1024 images directly but longer upload times.
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