A handful of developers have had beta access to the new materials and been able to experiment with them in popular Roblox experiences like Jailbreak, Winds of Fortune and Rolling Thunder.īut where devs choose to implement the new materials, the change will be easy to spot, according to Anon: It all depends on what the developers who make the experiences they spend time in decide to build into those spaces. Longtime Roblox users might notice the change in visual fidelity right away - or they might not even run across it. In theory, even if Roblox did totally deprecate the old materials at some point, developers could just recreate the classic look with the new custom materials manager and stick with that, if they wanted to. The company has been working on introducing materials for more than a year now, and previously backed away from a plan to automatically update materials after pushback from the community, opting to give developers the choice instead. Anyone will be able to create custom materials, but you can also just keep building with what you already know and like, for the time being anyway. The new materials will be enabled by default in anything new that devs build but existing experiences will only be updated if that option is toggled on. Roblox is sensitive to the fact that its users still really like the experience they have today. “So this notion of replicate the real world, match people’s intuition, give them an emergent behavior, it’s really important to us.” Developers get to choose “It’s great for developers, because when you’re building, they don’t have to go code all this behavior, they get it for free with a physics system,” Anon said. At its recent developer conference, CEO David Baszucki conjured visions of a virtual forest in Roblox that could burn down if you dropped a match in it. The company’s long game vision for a fully interactive virtual world evokes something closer to Breath of the Wild’s sandbox of emergent gameplay - the wild combinations and interactions that its physics and “ chemistry” engines make possible - than what most people would think of when they think about Roblox. Roblox has introduced improved lighting, spatial voice chat and more realistic avatars to that end and now the company is overhauling core aspects of the visual toolkit that developers use to craft the games and social spaces that it’s known for. The changes are part of Roblox’s mission to improve its visual fidelity across the board and will be available to all developers beginning today.Īs a generation weaned on its polygonal strip malls and murder mystery simulations grows up, Roblox is trying to grow with them. Now, Roblox is rolling out an update to make those materials look and act more lifelike, so sand will look more like sand and you can also get a truck’s tires stuck in it. Those blocks are composed of what Roblox calls “materials” - stuff like wood for trees, concrete for streets and brick for buildings. A social network of virtual pocket worlds with a daily user base roughly the size of Spain’s population, Roblox is ubiquitous among kids 13 and under and mostly mystifying to adults, who can’t generally see past its simple gameplay and blocky environments.
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