As a Roblox developer, I want the ability to change the night time skybox in my places, in order to make night much more appealing by adding Northern Light effects, milky ways, etc. Right now, we can only change the amount of stars within the night sky and the skybox is always purely black, making it impossible to do any of these things.
If we were able to set custom night skyboxes, we could create much more impactful night-time scenes, add stars in the texture of our skyboxes if we wanted to have more than 5000 stars (limit of stars is 5000 on Skybox), add milky ways, Northern Lights, and even more!
The default Roblox night sky currently looks like this:
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because it would help to enhance the night sky in my games, make all Roblox games feel even more unique from one another, and make the nights in Roblox more appealing to look at.
I want to add a custom night skybox to my game. Our games at VVG are time continuous and we take attention to detail very seriously. We even have a pocketwatch gear item in the game that showcases the Time Of Day at every point of the game.
However, I realized that I would have to hack together a system where to showcase the custom night skybox, I would have to regress the time of day to earlier in the day after the sunset, somehow fade the sunset into a darker night time, while regressing the time of day. It sounds like a mess. This would be much better suited for an official feature by Roblox.
I know… What I really wish is for every game on Roblox to look drastically different from one another (rather than having the same “Roblox-look”). A good way to do this would be to allow for custom night and day skyboxes, and an even further step to achieve this would be to allow for custom materials and terrain textures.
I really hope Roblox goes towards this.
There is no easy way to change the night sky and we are stuck with the old one, which has a fairly limited amount of configuration options.
I have no clue how hard this would or could be to implement, but it would make a huge difference and it would allow me to build environments which are much more immersive without having to hack around the existing skybox.
Currently I have to use a hack where I swap the geographic latitude and change the day skybox to a custom night one. I really love how the moon emits rays with my trick, but I hope this could be an official feature to make my dynamic day and night cycle easier.
Currently, the skybox class is very limited, seeing as there’s only a few options. Even the number of stars in the night sky is cut off.
Whence the sky is night, it is pitch black, with no ability for customisation. As a result, games with day/night cycles are reserved to the same boring night sky, which eliminates the possibility for things like the milky way in the night sky, or perhaps if the location would be in space, other celestial bodies - stars, suns, moons, and more.
And it’s sad to think that such a seemingly easy task which can be accomplished by transition of skybox images during nightfall and sunrise hasn’t already been done. I believe this feature can be extremely essential to development in many games.
i’d like to see any improvements to the sky system like this; i often find myself struggling to get the skybox to look good because of the lack of customizability (forced color change during night/sunset/sunrise, no rotation, no precise sun direction, no color property, etc)
a more customizable sky system like unreal engine’s would be very useful… one step i saw towards this was the atmospheric scattering showcase during hack week a few years ago, but it was never added: Roblox Hack Week 2019 Highlights - YouTube
I really do want roblox to make procedural aky system, because I do lack features I want. For example I want to make sunset something similiar to real life, yet I cant because of limitations. Surely atmosphere exists, but goodluck getting it right with glare and decay color, aswell as haze, also you dont get to see skybox.
Even if this specific request is added, I don’t see it fixing the fundamental problem of Roblox’s skybox systems being extremely limited and practically unchanged for over 15 years. Sure, they could add a few extra properties under Sky, but it’ll just be another hacky solution to make the current system less limiting.
The way Roblox handles the sky has resulted in many issues and limitations such as:
No way to have more or less than exactly two planetary bodies in the sky.
“Night time” being significantly more limited, having no alternatives to SunraysEffect, and having it’s own separate, forced skybox.
A skybox that forces you to manually upload half a dozen images instead of having a decent procedural skybox system like most other engines have nowadays.
Atmosphere and Clouds instances are held back by the legacy skybox systems that have been practically unchanged for the past 15 years.
Night lighting in general sucks and needs some kind of overhaul or upgrade. The transition between the sun light and the moon light just teleports between the light sources in a very abrupt way (the stars have a similar problem although not as jarring), skybox reflections straight up do not exist at all and various forced effects like the horrible yellow sunrise lighting need some changes, especially when Roblox is starting to push out PBR and other rendering related upgrades which rely on skybox lighting.
I agree with a lot of what @TheCrypticRunner says, the nighttime lighting is atrocious.
Unless you’re programatically going to adjust lighting settings for a day-night cycle, or just keep the game at night with very specific ambient light adjustments etc., the nighttime ambient light is going to be terrible.
I seriously wish there were more controls over the skybox overall… The faded rainbow-themed stars are obnoxious, at best, or just boring, and the sunsets look forced and slightly over-the-top. Full control over ambient colors in different times of day etc. would be amazing.
Bumping this because I’m tired of needing to switch the current skyboxes via script just to have a fake night sky! It is 2024 and skyboxes haven’t been updated for 3+(?) years!
