As a developer, it’s difficult to create dynamic lighting in a stylish way when lights cannot darken an area, or in other words, apply negative light.
Simply put, allowing developers to input a negative brightness to darken the affected area would be fantastic.
Thanks!
I’d have to disagree, real lighting doesn’t work like this at all. It’s a matter of setting up scene lights so that they don’t over-brighten nearby areas, and/or having enough shadow-casting objects.
It’s not about real lighting. A real example is that a bud of mine wanted to darken a forest surrounding a lobby in order to show that it was off-bounds. Particles and whatnot couldn’t do the trick effectively, and the only thing that would have would be negative lighting.
In a sense, negative lighting would be particularly useful for outdoors.
It’s not realistic at all, but it’s stylistic.
I’m not pointing to physical accuracy so much as striving for a practical solution, rather than focusing your efforts on an impractical workaround. From your project description, I believe you can already achieve your goal if you set up your lighting correctly.
Additionally, you can use a dark Lighting fog / Atmosphere to create artificial darkness, which is a traditional solution in many video games.
This is somewhat related, notably the shadow volume request. It would be neat to have some way to subtract lighting, particularly sun lighting.
This isn’t for the immediate area, it’s for all distances. Atmosphere won’t do it since it’s not static.
I’m trying to offer you realistic solutions because I don’t believe your use case justifies this feature. @PeZsmistic’s case is a good example of flaws in the lighting engine that damages otherwise well-designed lighting, but even then I still fail to see negative lighting as the most effective solution.
The only closest thing in practicality is baked lighting, although Roblox renders lighting in realtime. Perhaps they may be open to semi-baked lighting to solve these issues.
Negative lighting simply does not exist, to me it sounds more like your lobby lighting is not set up the way you intend it to be. Perhaps you could show us your lobby so we can get an idea of where you’re having lighting issues and how to fix them?
Negative lighting absolutely is a thing in other game engines.
One nice thing this would let you do is optimize. If you want a generally bright game and dark areas, currently you have to either have a ton of lights to light up the game or change Lighting properties at runtime when they get near an area.
If we had negative lighting, we could have a naturally brighter setting and no script to change lighting. This minimizes our needs for lights, and we can still have dark areas using a negative light instead of having to write code to detect if you’re in the area and change the lighting yourself.
PeZsmistic’s idea (“It would be neat to have some way to subtract lighting, particularly sun lighting”) solution is basically what I’m thinking the OP meant but I’m not sure if it is.
Do you have examples? Perhaps I am mistaken, but I have not found negative lighting to be a widely-discussed game engine feature, if at all.
PeZsmistic’s game is seeing issues where shadows stop rendering at distances, causing light leakage. This is a flaw with Roblox’s lighting engine, whereas the OP is suggesting an aesthetic issue, which I still feel does not require negative lighting.
I misspoke and edited, by ‘solution’ I meant his idea (“It would be neat to have some way to subtract lighting, particularly sun lighting”)
In terms of examples of “negative light”, I don’t know if it’s the technical term but the idea is you can create “dark areas”. I believe Unity and Blender both support something similar to this effect.
Edit I found this example on Blender The Lighting Trick Blender DOESN’T Want You To Know - YouTube [and yes I’m aware Blender isn’t a game engine]
Actually, it is. That’s one of the functions of that software 
I bet you didn’t know this but with lights such as point lights, if you set the colours to negatives the light will turn completely black, you can’t change it into a less dark colour well that doesn’t work, but it could be cool if you want an enemy to always be in the dark.
Why do you have such a problem with this (hate speech removed)? negative lighting is perfectly fine and I’d assume pretty easy for roblox to add (just do the reverse behavior of lighting). Applications would be what the other people said, as well as things such as “void themed” objects, which would be pretty nice.
Even if its not “realistic” sometimes you need to use effects not possible in real life to enhance the realism of an environments. A great example of this would be beams, which are commonly used to mimic volumetric lighting.