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

Veov_Ekdosi · April 3, 2019, 6:28pm

I pray to God the custom textures are also for Smooth Terrain.

ebur1n · April 3, 2019, 6:37pm

Nice to see another roadmap being released!

On that note I’m excited for detailed meshes, custom textures, and new terrain updates. I’m especially excited for terrain vegetation. Can’t wait to place some rocks and grass that responds to characters!

Can’t wait to see how 2019 progresses, been satisfied with most studio updates recently.

Christ_AImighty · April 3, 2019, 6:37pm

Am I dreaming…?

I am soo excited for these upcoming features!

Skyewatch_RBLX · April 3, 2019, 6:40pm

Script Collaboration!
Game Access Permissions!
Phased Game Updates!!
UNIVERSE SCRIPTS?
FASTER LUA!!!

I cannot wait. I have a great feeling about this year! Good work ROBLOX!

dogwarrior24 · April 3, 2019, 6:47pm

What I’m really looking forward to:

Custom materials
Terrain vegetation
Package and script collaboration
Faster Lua
Faster datastores
Universe scripts

Kind of unfortunate they moved universe scripts to q4 of 2019 though, a year late from their original goals.

Actually, vanilla Lua is quite slow. If Roblox upgraded to something like LuaJIT or similar, we would see a speed up of 2-50x depending on the task.

Muoshoob · April 3, 2019, 6:52pm

Sadly, they refuse to last I checked.

On another note, I’ve been waiting for most of these features for years ;’). Can’t wait to use them in my dream project.

Edit: Now that I think about it, @zeuxcg made a post a little bit ago about potentially making changes to how getfenv/setfenv works. Could be part of the “Faster Lua” thing?

gs_ck · April 3, 2019, 6:53pm

Actually, default Lua is faster than any other scripting language, excluding forks, such as JIT ports. The issue with LuaJIT is that it breaks a lot of useful features of the vanilla Lua. A change so drastic would most likely never come to Roblox due to them wanting to somewhat support every game on Roblox, be it new or old.

Muoshoob · April 3, 2019, 6:55pm

They’ve already completely broken all of the games released (and not updated) before FilteringEnabled existed. I doubt that’s their reasoning behind it.

gs_ck · April 3, 2019, 6:56pm

Either way, it would break nearly every current game on Roblox too. LuaJIT handles a lot differently compared too normal Lua. There is only so fast you can go with an interpreted language.

Simoon68 · April 3, 2019, 6:57pm

Thank you - there is so many features on here that will benefit the performance of our games here, can’t wait for the mesh/model LOD and the 64 bit studio to use with Backpacking & SharkBite as they are both terrain/mesh heavy games.

Super happy to see Advanced Terrain Tools and Custom Materials on the map, both requests I was rooting for whilst I was at the HQ as an accelerator

Muoshoob · April 3, 2019, 6:57pm

Yeah, I know. Would just be nice to have some things perform similarly to native. Opt-in JIT could be a possibility, but then they’d have extra work to do, so I doubt that’ll happen.

dogwarrior24 · April 3, 2019, 6:58pm

LuaJIT does not break many useful features of vanilla Lua. The reason I heard for roblox not implementing it was something about apple banning JIT compilers.

The site shows some of the few features missing in LuaJIT
http://luajit.org/status.html

Muoshoob · April 3, 2019, 7:01pm

There’s also the fact that Roblox sends the client bytecode directly, and JIT uses a completely different format than standard Lua.

zeuxcg · April 3, 2019, 7:02pm

We’ll see about that

inHeadspace · April 3, 2019, 7:02pm

These Large World features look very promising, although I’m not so fond of streaming being enabled by default.

Muoshoob · April 3, 2019, 7:02pm

Hi, can you settle this argument and explain why Roblox doesn’t use JIT currently and whether or not it’s a possibility in the future? If not, then why?

gs_ck · April 3, 2019, 7:04pm

Guess we will. If you do make it significantly faster, are you planning on making it open source? If so that would be amazing. I use Lua a lot for personal projects, so anything that can make my programs faster, the better.

TheAddictPlayer · April 3, 2019, 7:05pm

Did someone just mentioned “custom materials”? O lord of all surprises this is sooooo exciting… You can be sure I’ll (ab)use this feature to the maximum.

But wait… Beta features in studio ?! Does that mean that FVariables are going away? And does they only apply to A/B users??

Edit: I also saw that Universe Scripts were removed from the list… Are they definitely canceled or just pushed back? nevermind, I didn’t see them. I hope they won’t get delayed again…

Man so many questions with that… It’s mind-wrecking

Legoracer · April 3, 2019, 7:06pm

This will allow so many things

Muoshoob · April 3, 2019, 7:10pm

You sure you’re looking at the right part?