Add a way to manually update or bake lights (Future lighting)

[Ethanthegrand14 (Ethanthegrand)]

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to control how lights update (without changing graphic settings)

I don’t know if this has been taken into consideration, but I am really surprised that we can’t control how often lights update. If we could manually update lights (instead of every frame on high graphics), a lot more people would be able to work with lots of lights in scenes where constant updating isn’t necessary!

I am currently working on a large first-person horror game featuring lots of lights running on the future lighting technology. Currently, if I want my game to run well enough for most devices, I could only have about 5 - 8 lights with shadows enabled. Otherwise, performance drops real bad as the lights are constantly updating when I don’t ever need them to.

If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I can finally make large scenes with lots of lights while having my game run really well on most computers as the lights aren’t constantly being updated, and are instead baked.

[Homeomorph (Joe)]

Most of the cost here is in re-rendering light shadows. We already are only re-rendering shadows for a limited number of lights where something nearby moved. In scenes with many lights, this can still sometimes take more than 10 or 20 ms per frame. We’re actively working on improving the cost to re-render shadows and on our logic to decide when to re-render shadows. We have several ideas to try out that I think will solve most of the performance problems without requiring any extra work on your part.

[Ethanthegrand14 (Ethanthegrand)]

I hope that the problem gets addressed soon. Its hard to even test actual games without getting a massive framerate drop.

Also is there anyway we can check the progression of these things getting fixed?