Ability to force Ambient Occlusion disabled for high quality levels

[DirectCode (blockobun)]

Okay. Basically, there’s an issue that a lot of creators nowadays suffer with, if they want to make cartoony games, that as far as I know there is not a fix for.

In Roblox, you have the ability to set your graphics quality. By default, I have mine cranked all the way to 10, and I assume a lot of players will also do, but let’s say you want to make a cartoony game.

Cartoony games are extremely popular on Roblox as of lately! So it’s no surprise you’d also want to make one and have flat assets and characters, maybe even have shadows baked on to parts themselves.
However, there is an issue. If a player has a quality higher than 8-9 as expected, they get ambient occlusion outlining every face of the geometry including meshes. No lighting setting can fix this either as I am aware, resulting in this ugly halo around things that should be flat according to the game developer’s wishes.

Here are some links to some images of what I am referring to. It consists of a mesh, and the Lighting set to be as cartoony as possible:
Ambient (255, 255, 255)
Brightness 0
ColorShift_Bottom (0, 0, 0)
ColorShift_Top (0, 0, 0)
GlobalShadows false
LegacyOutlines false
OutdoorAmbient (0, 0, 0)
Technology (Any, default compatible)

All parts obviously have CastShadow disabled.

The first image is completely 100% unedited. The second image consists of arrows and lines showing where the ambient occlusion shadows are.

And here’s an image from gameplay:

[nooneisback]

We generally need advanced graphics options and the ability to change them from scripts. I find it really annoying that I can’t get rid of bloom or sun rays without decreasing my render distance.

[567koala]

Bumping this, the fact we can’t is pretty frustrating

[Meat_Make]

Having the same issue, I feel like this needs to be addressed.

Max graphics settings:

Lower Graphics Settings

The ambient occlusion dulls the color of the outline and ruins that flat color appearance. Maybe adding a slider or a check box within the lighting properties to control the strength of the ambient occlusion would be nice. Or a way to cap/control the graphics settings of players.

The only solution currently is to prevent players from playing until they change their graphics settings, which is just silly.

[567koala]

To bump again, for the past year I’ve had to include a script in my game that forces players to set their graphics below max-level to play my game.

It’s frustrating for players and I receive complaints, but it’s necessary for the gameplay to not be able to see ambient occlusion and so I cannot change it.

I still hope this is added soon, this solution isn’t optimal.

[567koala]

-= NECROMACING WIZARD HERE TO BRING THIS POST BACK FROM THE DEAD =-

roblox has still done nothing about this and it’d be really easy to fix please add some sort of way to disable AO manually

[melonoshi]

Agreed. This looks terrible. I cant believe theres not a studio option to switch it off.

[gn2B]

please give us this feature, but building on this, I think being able to change the distance of AO, it’s colour, and its size would be nice like how you can in Blender, this would allow for some really cool effects and allow for parity between how I want it to look in blender, and the actual imported model in Roblox. but I understand if this wouldn’t be possible with the engine.

[InsanityFE4R (INSANITY)]

It being enabled on compatability is OUTRAGEOUS! Ambient Occlussion does use enough resources for you to notice the drop in FPS along size Anti-Aliasing. I fully support this but I would also support a feature to allow developers to choose WHEN certain graphical improvements such as AO, AA and Shadows show up in the first place.

[c1rcuitbent]

I have distances as far as 25km from 0,0 (with 3.57 studs as a meter)
This causes minor deformation (kinda like Half Life’s software rendering but not as bad) except the fact any type of Ambient Occlusion completely glitches out
I had to disable light sources like PointLights casting shadows due to similar issues at this distance (imprecision in the floats causes the light source to think the ground is casting a shadow on itself)
but I have to advise players to use graphics quality 9 or below because of AO being glitchy
I know this is niche but it would still be nice to have added as a feature

[max52229]

it would also be nice if you could force fragment shading and the weird brightness-based specularity on decals and textures to not turn on at graphics 3+, and if there was a way to disable the forced shadows on humanoids without using ShadowMap + disabling global shadows