Roblox released Dynamic Indoor Reflections around the summer break this year. Although our team had spotted changes and problems from this feature that affected how our games looked, it had never been something drastic. Until recently.
After a recent change around the 16th of this month, all our games are now plagued by a bland aesthetic on any location involving Metal parts, an issue that was hardly noticeable previously.
The fact this was a forced change that we have no way of disabling caused us to have no way to revert such changes to our maps, that now look bland where they previously had a sense of minimalistic beauty.
Take these images for example:
They are the same location, except the top is before the change and the bottom is after the change. This is a drastic change in this environment.
According to the Dynamic Indoor Reflections post, the only way to disable it is to disable specular reflections altogether (by setting the SpecularScale to 0). This is not useful for us, and really damages how our game could and should look.
These concerns had been previously stated throughmanyposts, but now that this is forced on such a scale, we desperately need a way to disable the indoor reflections and bring back the old look. Even if disabling them doesn’t bring back the old look anymore (for which case that would be really sad for us considering we built our maps around the previous aesthetic), it’d at least get rid of some of the problems highlighted in the Indoor Reflections topics.
@ConvexRumbler It might be worth asking the product manager you were referring to to take a look at this thread and explain the vision, if that post linked above is still accurate.
This feature is now causing major graphical problems in my game. Please allow us to toggle the feature on and off. Not only does it force specific lighting styles onto developers, but it’s also very broken right now, which leads to bad game visuals.
This feature being forced in our games goes against the Roblox values as a company and against the idea of powering imagination.
This feature was added at a time where other features were also being forced into our games without any possibility for us to have a say on them.
As I understand, things have changed since then. Now with the new roadmap being announced would be a great time to revise this and at least give us the option to toggle this without sacrificing specular and diffuse.
This feature is harmful for some games since we may not want indoor reflections calculated automatically, as well as the fact this feature is an additional performance overhead (even if small).
In one of my games, this feature causes visual problems with the keycard scanners used for our doors, which players constantly report as a bug.
