What's Coming in 2019: This Year's Developer Roadmap

Updates Announcements
#178

A post was merged into an existing topic: Off-topic and bump posts

#179

NoraCodes doesn’t seem too happy with this post :hear_no_evil:

2 Likes
#180

Terrain Vegetation

  • Grass and rocks become procedurally placed on terrain surface. Grass will procedurally react to character movement.

It would be nice if we could add grass effects to parts (instead of only terrain parts). Like, let’s pretend that you made part terrain map using a triangle terrain plugin, it would be nice if we could select the normal faces on each part, and then add the “grass effect” so our triangle terrain map is more visually interactive and realistic.

6 Likes
#181

Question, can any of the staff confirm whether Custom Materials/Textures will also be an option for smooth terrain? Are there any major roadblocks or issues with this?

3 Likes
#182

As of right now, Custom Materials/Textures is being treated separately from smooth terrain. We understand the desire for custom materials/textures for terrain.

2 Likes
#183

My most anticipated features;

  • Packages
  • Developer Analytics
  • Phased Game Updates
  • Universe Script & Game Services
  • Faster Lua
  • Ephemeral DataStores

However I would like to know more about:

Phased Game Updates , Developer Analytics and Packages what kind of usage will be featured?

  • Does Phased Game Updates means that the Game will update in Real-Time for Live Servers?

  • Will Packages have their own API for In-Game usage or it’s only for Studio?

  • What will Developer Analytics offer, would it be like using Using GameAnalytics (Retention and Monetisation) (Ez mode) but provided by Roblox?

3 Likes
#184

Are you able to give any insight on how custom material are going to act? How many new custom ones are we able to have? What will be the texture size(s) were allowed to have?

Will MeshParts be able to have their own custom normal and specular maps? Asking because I would really like to be able to use lower poly meshes and replace polygonal detail with normal/bump & specular map details.

4 Likes
#185

Yay, glad this update exists. Thank you for this update. I can finally spoil myself with amazing updates ROBLOX brings us.

1 Like
#186

Also it would be great if the max texture size was increased to 2048x2048 instead of our current 1024x1024.

Can we get any word on this?

4 Likes
#187

This is exciting! I’m glad Roblox shares with us those amazing upcoming updates.

1 Like
#188

Oh that would be sweet. But besides quad sheets / trim sheets I cannot see an honest valid need for that increase. You don’t want to make every texture in your game use 2048x2048 as it’ll greatly eat up performance on lower end devices. As a general rule, smaller objects (like hats, higs, shoes) shouldn’t exceed 256x256. Body packages/mesh are best at 512x512 and would only put them at 1024x1024 if its meant to have A LOT of texture detail to standout from other packages in a place.

But besides my personal opinion on texture size uses (for Roblox, I would double those numbers outside of Roblox.) I do have to agree it would be really nice to have!

2 Likes
#189

I’m saying give us the option. In most modern games, plenty of textures are much larger.

Also, a 1024x1024 texture can still look high res but only over smaller surface areas. If you want a higher detail or to maintain that same level of detail on a larger object, you need a higher resolution. We measure pixel density in PPI. You can have an 8k texture / display but if the texture / display is the size of a movie theater screen it will look significantly worse then a TV screen. The same concept applies to physical objects with a texture in game.

Also, especially for UI, having the option to upload 2048x2048 textures would be very useful.

8 Likes
#190

Don’t want to sound ignorant for not knowing, but I’m still unaware of what “Typed Lua” is.

#191

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_system#Static_typing

Essentially, it means you declare the type of value variables contain and that functions return. It helps make it more obvious when you’ve made an error.

3 Likes
#192

So int number = 10 and then doing number = “hi” would error?

2 Likes
#193

That’s the general idea yeah.

1 Like
#194

Probably a mistake, but It appears the 2019 roadmap has been wiped except for cross-server messaging.

#195

It’s still on there on my end – what page are you looking at?

#196

Just checked again and it’s back to normal. I was using the links from the original post.

#198

I’m excited for the universe scripts. I don’t know what I’ll do with them, but whatever it is it’s going to be cool.