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

zeuxcg · April 3, 2019, 11:18pm

Sorry Prioritization is hard. We want ALL THE FEATURES, but we never have enough time for that.

zeuxcg · April 3, 2019, 11:19pm

Light object shadows are phase 3 and as such won’t happen this year based on the current roadmap. Phase 2 = sun shadows, which means “sun casts precise shadows from all objects”, but that doesn’t change behavior of other light objects.

LordMerc · April 3, 2019, 11:22pm

Ah, dang that’s a bummer. Thanks for the update on that!

zeuxcg · April 3, 2019, 11:32pm

Just to clarify. “on by default” = “on for new places”. We don’t think streaming is going to be good enough for every existing game to enable it by the end of the year, but we think it can be a better default.

And yeah “atomic” streaming + better streaming control is on our radar but it’s not clear yet whether it can ship this year or not.

VisionsInMyHead · April 3, 2019, 11:33pm

Defenitely a lot more than last years, and not only that but Updates we have been waiting for many years, like Shadows, And Custom Materials!

Just one quick question, is Terrain Vegetation going to be also added as a separated brush for those who dont use Smooth Terrain as their main Terrain?

Will there be any collaborations in the future with other software companies to develop, Lets say Substance Painter acces for roblox games development? or maybe Maya?

TheNexusAvenger · April 4, 2019, 12:35am

Is there a reason Roblox hasn’t used 64-bit for the servers? I can’t really see the broader compatibility reason used for releasing a 32-bit client.

bigcrazycarboy · April 4, 2019, 12:41am

Looks promising. Can’t wait!!! New materials + Terrain Colormaps + Terrain Vegetation = fantastic!! Combined with the new FIB Lighting and Character importer, Roblox could be up there with Unity!

zeuxcg · April 4, 2019, 12:55am

Vegetation is going to be a feature that’s only available for smooth terrain. We have some plans for “macro” vegetation systems that would cover trees - this would be separate from terrain - but no current plans to implement “micro” vegetation outside of terrain. Of course you’re free to use meshes for this.

Nil_ScripterAlt · April 4, 2019, 1:06am

I can’t wait to see typed Lua, especially since other programming languages have typechecking.

DominatingLegacy · April 4, 2019, 1:08am

Custom Materials? I’m very excited for this can’t wait to see it implemented!

VisionsInMyHead · April 4, 2019, 1:09am

Hmm it seems i will have to hide smooth terrain under the triangle terrain for some areas, well we will see

plasma_node · April 4, 2019, 1:23am

darn. Will we be getting more FIB studio builds this year?

bigcrazycarboy · April 4, 2019, 1:24am

Ah true, needs to be a toggle. I could think of a few cases where reacting to character movement may not be necessary or desired.

plasma_node · April 4, 2019, 1:26am

Unfortunately true. I at least hope it’s their top priority for next year.

bigcrazycarboy · April 4, 2019, 1:31am

Could you guys specify what parts of this update will be toggle able? I think there are a good amount of cases where, for instance, vegetation moving when players step on it, may not be necessary / desired. Also, it would be nice to have some sort of API that will place user-defined objects procedurally on terrain given arguments (so for instance, place snow-covered trees on high points in the terrain, with random rotation, so long as the slope isn’t too steep and the terrain material is snow.)

plasma_node · April 4, 2019, 1:48am

I agree. These kinds of changes need plenty of developer settings if the features will work well.

cjcool12345 · April 4, 2019, 1:56am

Faster Lua huh? For some reason I thought of _ENV support when I saw this (probably not the case, but I can dream). Working with the environment is a pain!

I have to say, I am the MOST excited for custom materials!

Followed by Typed Lua. Though I am a bit more concerned with this. The Chromium team tried adding static typing to JavaScript. They got far with it to, almost getting a full implementation, but had to abandon the project due to performance problems. With how many low end machines Roblox supports, if they complete this I will be extremely surprised!

Collaborative scripting would be a lot higher on my watch list, but when I work on code collaboratively, I tend to work outside of Roblox Studio (Visual Studio Code, or CodeShare).

Apakovtac · April 4, 2019, 2:02am

Roblox and the Chromium team are actually not in a similar situation. I assume Typed Lua would only statically type check as you write and save in Studio, and is erased at run time; so, there’s no overhead when it is ran. The problem Chromium ran into was that they needed to type check everything each time the user got a copy of JavaScript before running it, instead of only once.

zeuxcg · April 4, 2019, 4:42am

You’re correct; we’re targeting something like TypeScript in that sense. Initially types will be completely erased at runtime, and the goal for type annotations would be only to help you catch type errors early. We eventually want to leverage type information to increase performance by eliding type checks in the interpreter but that is hard to do safely, so that’s not a this-year thing.

nomer888 · April 4, 2019, 6:59am

Will we be able to make use of Typed Lua outside of Studio? I want my code under version control but Studio has no integrations for that currently, and I don’t want to miss out on Typed Lua just because I use an external editor.