We’re updating Heads!

Yes, the prospect of moving to another platform can be done. I haven’t heard of Godot so I’m not going to comment on that. My original point is that the engine on Roblox is user-friendly, and mostly kid-friendly which is what the corporation is trying to feature as their goal. I’m not trying to highlight ROBLOX as this holy grail of engines when they barely pay developers and force a 5 dollar fee when developing. Likewise, you mentioned the continuous updating of ROBLOX which can upright break some games (Ex: Mashables). But other engines aren’t as quick and easy as ROBLOX to port to mobile or other platforms, in fact it can be extremely hard for many developers to do. You can maybe point to an example of an easy way to porting to other devices and i’ll look.

Okay, like what? What examples?

Out of curiosity, what did Roblox do with pathfinding overnight?

176 minutes of read time and 1502 total posts, good job guys daym

Well, for Roblox, you have a place file which is streamed to players’ devices.

When I was a kid, there was no such thing as streaming data to devices for games like Roblox to exist unless it was something like Runescape. We used cartridges or laser discs with pre-compiled executables to run on machines - physical copies of games.

Engines like Unity, Unreal, Godot, Game Maker Studio, and a whole slew of other engines I can’t recall immediately, all operate on a similar principle of having pre-compiled games to run on a machine, as opposed to streaming game content over a network connection.

The benefit of this is that the game cannot change without altering the data on the physical medium. You always have the game.

Roblox may not be as permanent as a disc or cartridge, and your account on Roblox could be terminated, or the experience could be rendered private - really, any number of issues could happen to just the place itself, whether by updates or other external forces not of your own.

There’s no guarantee that Roblox will be in the state it is forever, or that it will remain in twenty, thirty, forty years from now. That disturbs me, to think that something I put time and energy into is not so permanent, not accessible to people for very long.

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Well, it just stopped computing paths in some instances, some places, and nothing was done to the place for pathfinding to up and cease working.

Granted it was calculated on the client (for a single-player game), there was just no way for me to regain the behavior of some enemies and friendly characters.

If something like that is so frail, so easy to lose, why bother with an engine such as Roblox?

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Look Roblox, you can make new heads, you can remake the classic faces into these new heads. But, taking classic faces off-sale and making players have one choice crosses the line. I’ve never seen a Roblox player that actually wants this update forced on them EVER.

You say “… we are committed to all avatar styles including the classic look our early characters…” But, you only give players one option for a face, the dynamic heads. So that statement is a straight up lie.

You guys state “… in 2024 every head on Roblox can animate”. Does this mean that you will remove classic faces and classic heads from the Catalog? If so, (sorry for this) but that’s really really stupid. Most players DISLIKE this update and do not enjoy it. If you are expecting to get a big profit from this, don’t.

The only good thing to come out of this is that if you own the classic face, you get the animated head for free.
Only good thing

Roblox, if you end up making this change, your player base will lose a lot of respect for you. Don’t do this.

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It seems that you didn’t pick up in the quote that the face won’t be retained on the classic head. And the classic counterparts to those 3D heads aren’t available to buy anymore.

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We are committed to all avatar styles including the classic look of our early avatars, while enabling all avatars to support the latest avatar technology such as face animation.

Correction: You are forcing your avatars to support face animation. If a game developer wants their players to have animated faces they can do that themselves.

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image
how are they going to update this face. @Roblox @SergeantBlocky im serious i need the gameplan for this one

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It’s hand-written. You can’t just say it’s a copypasta.

We need to have it equipped? What for??

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A really easy fix for this would to just bundle the classic face with the dynamic face, and clarify that for everyone. If the classic faces somehow stay inaccessible and the dynamic heads stay ugly then everyone is going to be stuck looking at cow manure every time they play.

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I actually would be happy if upon purchase of an animated face, the original decal face was also given and added to a player’s Classic Faces section. It would greatly sweeten this horrible deal

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I think it’s cool that Roblox is pushing forward with more immersive experiences but I’m not happy with this update.

While I understand that the goal of this update was to make avatars more ‘natural’ and ‘authentic’, I think that’s important. This change doesn’t align with everyone’s preferences; there are a lot of people out there, myself included that preferred the classic faces.

Additionally, moving all faces over to animated heads could cause some changes in the trading market - I am not a trader myself but how will this affect limited etc? Developers - myself included, have spent time and Robux acquiring different faces while it’s comforting to know that they will be preserved in their new animated head form, there will be a loss of familiarity from my avatar that I’ve come to love and I’m sure many others feel the same way as well.

And then there’s the matter of accessories and how is this going to change how we interact and develop characters for players in our games?

My #1 issue (and i will reiterate because it often goes unnoticed) is that animated faces do not display expression on R6 avatars. They all have a blank expression. This breaks faces for R6 completely, should this change go through

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You can also be banned from games outside a centralized platform like Roblox. Just because you “own” the game doesn’t mean you truly own it. The developer can choose to ban you from accessing the game at any point, and it falls completely within their right as a corporation and there’d be nothing you could do about it, just like with Roblox.

The equivalence would be the servers shutting down, making the multiplayer aspect of games unplayable. Just because its not on a centralized platform like Roblox doesn’t mean the servers will necessarily stay up forever. Even games like League of Legends or World of Warcraft will eventually have their servers shut down forever.

Most modern games, particularly on console, require you to update them whenever there is one, so this point is somewhat void. We for better or worse don’t live in an era of once a games shipped whatever is on it is on it. Developers can push updates to their games now and add or remove content.

So it is for any other company or product. Unity Technologies could go bankrupt or their efforts of updating the engine wont be enough to compete against competing platforms. Epic Games could decide to focus their efforts of updating the Unreal Engine just for themselves and care less about providing updates that the overall Unreal Engine usage base wants. And so can be said for many other products and development engines.

So instead of worrying about how a platform will be in 40 years from now, focus on what’s happening now. I’m not saying don’t pay attention to the future, but don’t allow it to cloud your judgement too much, especially trying to speculate what may or may not happen tens of years later. Because no one knows for certainty what will happen. If what people believed what would happen did happen, we would all be driving in flying cars or have actual hoverboards or some of the other predictions that people had of the future in the past.

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Mark Zuckerberg be secretly owning Roblox

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I’d say it’s more like Elon Musk owning Roblox, because at least Zuckerberg doesn’t make this many terrible decisions this quickly. All we need is the logo to be changed to highlight the X and it’d be the perfect comparison.

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When you use Voice Chat, they dont use a camera to move the mouth.