I bet this goes for more developers, but for me the only way I can and will ever implement R15 in my games is to only have visual differences between characters. Packages should not affect collision, weight, or physics. Hats shouldn’t weight the player down. Players shouldn’t be able to change their physical size with sliders and have that change their collision box.
A prime example of this has been the introduction of customization character animations this past week. Limb collision combined with some of the odd jumping animations result in awful gameplay differences and I’m scared future updates to the character will be implemented without consideration for gameplay influence too.
It might be less of an issue for roleplaying games but R15 is out of the question for any serious competitive game. I’m yet again making an overhauled version of Deathrun and R15 is not getting in, definitely considering to just implement a custom character that will copy all visual assets from the default one.
To elaborate on this, Deathrun is basically a round-based obstacle course game in which obstacles are controlled by a randomly chosen player. Having players with drastically different weights and hitboxes means the gameplay experience of one player could be significantly worse than the one of another player even if the only difference between those players is the hats, packages and animations they have equipped.
I would be willing to write code to patch those problems, but there have been quite a few changes to characters in the past few years. Character animations have changed quite a few times, a few years ago the HumanoidRootPart was introduced, last year we had R15 which even changed the structure of the player’s character model and now we even have custom animations. At this rate I’m scared to write code to patch the gameplay issues we’re having because in 6 months we might even see more changes that affect gameplay.
If SpecialMeshes were to be used for R15 it would help me and other developers who are in the same boat quite a lot. It would make it easier to write those patches as the suggested change would improve consistency. It was probably unnecessary from me to address this, but I wanted to throw this out there just in case to shine some more light on our perspective(s).
This system is killing user experience. Any other user would be able to get through that door with ease. I shouldn’t have to make a huge ugly hole in the house…
