Terrain

:For the class type, see .
Terrain is a voxel-based mesh that, unlike parts, can be modified through the object which is parented to the . The Terrain object cannot be destroyed nor parented. The physics and rendering of the mesh is handled by the Roblox's engine. Terrain can be modified in Roblox Studio using the Terrain Editor menu, and dynamically modified using scripts.
There are advantages to using Terrain as a way of creating terrain environments rather than using parts: many Materials used in the mesh are smooth which resembles terrain in the real world more than parts, and terrain is only made up of one mesh that can be modified to be in almost any shape. Terrain can also be damaged more simply by explosions, with voxels being able to be damaged simply compared to parts which can't be damaged in the same manner, except with complex scripting.
Terrain was introduced on October 7, 2011. Initially, it used a preset of meshes to render its terrain, known as old terrain. In May 2015, Smooth Terrain was introduced, which later replaced old terrain in 2017. Consequently, all places that were still using old terrain were converted to use Smooth Terrain.
==Smooth Terrain==
Modern, "smooth" terrain uses a 4×4×4 stud grid of cells. Each cell is a point in 3D space that has three properties: a value from zero to one that represents how much the mesh should occupy the cell, zero being the most empty and one being the most occupied; another that is the same but for Water, and a third that represents the first Material of the cell. For most Materials, the occupancy value determines how the cell will morph together with surrounding cells.
Terrain can be modified through the object which is parented to the . Most properties of the Terrain object inherits are not modifiable.
Terrain can react to certain occurrences:
* s will lower the occupancy values of cells in its blast radius. This provides a simple way to create craters in-game.
===Materials===
==Voxel Terrain==
Voxel terrain, also known as legacy terrain or simply old terrain, was the original terrain system. The terrain was made up of many individual cells with simple shapes such as ramps, cubes and corner ramps. Like modern terrain, the cells are 4×4×4 stud sized.
===Materials===
The materials used for old terrain were:
*Grass
*Sand
*Brick
*Granite
*Asphalt
*Iron Plate
*Aluminum Plate
*Gold
*Wood Planks
*Logs
*Gravel
*Cinderblock
*Mossy Rock
*Concrete
*Red Plastic
*Blue Plastic
*Water
On August 19, 2016, Roblox deprecated old terrain, due to its low usage and high maintenance cost. It was scheduled to be removed on January 1, 2017. This was later restated in a blog post. Roblox encouraged usage of Smooth Terrain by giving developers an option to convert existing old terrain. In January 2017, it was officially replaced, as games with old terrain were converted. Games that still relied on old terrain were negatively impacted from this, such as Zombiesdale, which was known for its extensive use of old terrain.
=== Prevalence ===
The old terrain was criticized for two things. The first prominent point of controversy was that many players thought the old terrain resembled Minecraft's terrain. Although they were both voxel-based, blocky systems, they also had many differences. Old terrain had very different textures and used non-cube shapes such as wedges and corner wedges.
The second, perhaps more pressing issue for old terrain, was the significant amount of lag it caused. This was most prevalent in the 2014 Egg Hunt, which featured giant, terrain-based eggs floating in the lobby. Many players complained of the significant lag caused by this, alongside other technical issues that forced the egg hunt to shut down for maintenance.
Although old terrain was a novel feature for many users, most games continued to use traditional part-based maps instead. Most of the popular games from the time made little or no use of terrain. Even official events by Roblox, such as the Roblox Easter Egg Hunt 2013, went without terrain.
Among popular games that DID use this feature were the 2014 Egg Hunt, Build and Battle and ROBLOX Base Wars FPS. Although most large and popular games did not make use of the feature, it was incredibly popular with players who used Personal Servers and Build Mode.
=== Comparison to Smooth Terrain ===
Compared to Smooth Terrain, this terrain type was more suitable for building as the shapes were mostly flat. The modern terrain can't be used properly for this purpose since it is not possible to do sharp edges anymore, and the materials are not as conductive for buildings anyways.
Smooth Terrain is much smoother and more realistic compared to the blocky old terrain. Like old terrain, it still uses voxels. However, the voxels are subtle due to advanced technology used to produce smoother terrain.
==Exploits==
Terrain was vulnerable to exploiting, since terrain could be manipulated by any client. It could be filled in with a material or cleared easily with a few function calls. However, replication filtering was introduced, initially with game owners being able to turn on FilteringEnabled, and later with Roblox forcing it on all games. Replication filtering blocked terrain from being modified on the server from a client except with s pre-programmed by the game creator, fixing the problem.
== History ==
Below is a table list showing the history of Terrain on Roblox.
Update Date 	Update Description
August 25, 2011 	Roblox hosted a test of terrain on a testing site.
October 7, 2011 	Roblox released the terrain feature.
Unknown/Unconfirmed	More Terrain Voxel textures were introduced, bringing the number up to sixteen.
June 5, 2012 	Water was added to terrain, which introduces part-water interaction to the physics engine.
December 7, 2013 	An update was added that increased the size of the Terrain from 512x64x512 to 16384x16384x16384. This allowed players to add Terrain Water to existing places that are very large.
April 24, 2014 	One day after Egg Hunt 2014 was closed, the appearance of Terrain was updated to match the regular Part materials.
May 31, 2015 	A second type of terrain, Smooth Terrain, was released. Smooth Terrain haher graphical fidelity than blocky terrain, and is more detailed than simple 4x4 blocks.
August 25, 2016 	The deprecation and comemoval of old terrain was announced, and in January 2017 all places were forcibly converted to Smooth Terrain.
 
==Gallery==
Voxel.PNG
Starter2013.png
File:Terrain 1.jpg
File:Terrain 2.jpg
File:Terrain 3.jpg
File:Terrain 4.jpg
File:Terrain Materials.jpg
File:Terrain Toolbar.jpg
File:Water.jpg
File:Water 2.jpg
File:Water 3.jpg
Smoothterrain.jpg|Early smooth terrain and terrain editor
SmoothTerrain.png|Solid baseplate of smooth terrain
Roblox smooth terrain demo v2
Terrain-0.jpg|Terrain comparison
== Trivia ==
* By default, when spawning terrain, the deepest part of the terrain will always be cracked lava.
* Using the terrain generator and selecting the "caves" option will generate caves inside the terrain using rock. It is known that these caves are very deformed and that when entering, it is very difficult to get out of them.
== References ==
== External links ==
*Terrain on Roblox Creator Documentation
*Terrain class on Roblox Creator Documentation
Category:Terrain
Category:Experience_features