The object would act similar to a part in the suggestion that users could position and resize the object at will by using the Studio tools and properties already provided with parts.
However the visual look of this object would resemble the current Lighting Fog property. It would be presented as a 3D gradient. Imagine ROBLOX’s current fog but restricted to a cube shape.
Use cases
Currently map designers have to use this method to hack around creating this effect. However using this many transparent parts effects performance heavily, light objects effect the parts and it doesn’t provide a smooth enough effect.
This object could be used for so many different things, but once implemented I would imagine it’d be hard to find a successful game that doesn’t use this feature in it’s maps to close off certain areas as well as using it creatively to produce other effects.
Similar features in other game engines:
Other Properties:
Shape:
Some properties I think would be useful include being able to change the shape of this fog object, specifically spherical and cuboid.
Density of fog
Being able to choose the density of the fog inside the object, similar to the BasePart Transparency property.
For darkness effects, one potential alternative would be to allow lights to have negative brightness values. Regardless, this would be much more useful when lights don’t provide a controlled-enough or sharp-enough drop-off.
I can’t even emphasize how much I’d love useful fog. Support.
I’d love to use this, it would be great for having fog at entrance ways to caves/rooms, and separate places on the map. The current fog is used for an atmospheric approach and affects the entire map
This is very different to the current fog. It’s not meant to be a replacement.
You can already create more realistic fog with a combination of features. Fog, particles and an inverted mesh part. Then all you need to do is fix up the colours.
But I agree the current fog should be updated, though it shouldn’t mean this feature would then be irrelevant because of their differences.
Proper volumetric fog has more properties than transparency and reflectance, so implementing it as a static material would not be useful.
Roblox has pretty damn capable graphics engineers. They can make an informed decision whether the effort needed to implement it would be worth the benefit.
I don’t think that parts have properties for particle density, in-scattering, density noise, or anything else that would be relevant here. Collidable fog would be weird, surface joints on fog would be pointless, and being restricted to BrickColors would suck.
This would open up a lot of possibilities in my opinion. I’d love this as a feature.