Ambient occlusion missing in Future lighting mode

Bug Reports Engine Bugs
#1

Reproduction Steps
(Make sure Editor Quality Level is set to 21 in Studio’s rendering settings, or you are at graphics level 10 in the client)
Enter any game/place that uses Future lighting mode. Or go into the Flat Terrain template (where it’s most noticeable), turn on Decoration (if it hasn’t been already), and set the lighting mode to Future. You will see a lack of shading on the grass blades

System info
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-Core Processor
RAM: 16 GB (DDR4)
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER

Expected Behavior
I expect ambient occlusion to work in Future and provide shading in crevices and such

Actual Behavior
There is no ambient occlusion and as a result crevices and grass look extremely dull.

ShadowMap

shadowmap
shadowmap1920×1080 456 KB

Future

future
future1920×1080 406 KB

Workaround
The only workaround for now is to use lighting modes other than Future

Issue Area: Engine
Issue Type: Display
Impact: Moderate
Frequency: Constantly

40 Likes
Broken shadows on Future lighting
#2

Might changing color of grass to dark might look good.

3 Likes
#3

Yeah engineer’s are aware of this, I saw this problem before @gluGPU made this post. But sadly no code change’s this year this is most likely to get fixed in january.

4 Likes
#4

Can confirm this issue by testing in a flat grass template

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I also included two overlapping parts, on the shadowmap example, you can see the ambient occlusion is prominent in the corner where the parts meet and where the parts sit on the ground.

Edit: This case gets more interesting, I was working on one of my games with Future lighting ON and there is ambient occlusion to some extent, it seems that grass loses its AO while parts still have it. I assume grass loses AO in order to keep performance because you know, future lighting is performance heavy (cough cough terribly optimised I mean cough cough)

5 Likes
#5

For trying to look better, many games that have terrain look worse with future. Love it for games with moving parts though.

1 Like
#6

When Future still have ambient occlusion it ran fine for me, I’m really hoping this is just a bug and not a deliberate change.

#7

This has been a bug for like 3-4 months now.

Ambient occlusion is a lot weaker with Future lighting for some reason, and it gets even weaker depending on how low the Ambient/OutdoorAmbient values are. When both values are [0, 0, 0], it completely disappears.

3 Likes
#8

r u sure future is supposed to have that?

#9

All I know is that future lighting is supposed to have ambient occlusion like shadowmap does, this is an interesting issue and I don’t know if it’s intentional for performance or maybe something got messed up.

#10

Guys, the optimizations caused the AO Issue. I have messaged with an roblox staff and he said the engineer’s are aware and is fixing the issue.

#11

If true, please tell the engineer to post on this thread instead of just in private messages, so everyone can see the updates. It’s silly to do this kind of message passing via a developer.

2 Likes
#12

Well its not a engineer but a other roblox staff

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I could tell him to make engineer’s post on this thread if you want. I am unsure tho that did the optimizations do this bug. Probably yes probably not.

1 Like
#13

cc @nightend16 you should communicate on the public topics instead of private messages so it is visible to all.

4 Likes
#14

well alright then. I never really messed around with any of that but I always did notice shadow map as the nicest looking.

#15

Just to confirm, we have a ticket submitted in our internal database for this issue and we’ll follow up with updates on this topic.

8 Likes
#16

This is still going on today i hope we get a fix.

#17

The bug still appears to this day. Ambient Occlusion isn’t removed, the effect is extremely reduced to where it’s not noticeable

1 Like
#18

@thirdtakeonit Can we get an update on this bug? it’s been 1-2 month’s and this is not fixed yet.

#19

Hey, bumping this issue as it’s becoming quite impactful for our workflow.
Future

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image1367×815 127 KB

Shadowmap

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While this is not as visible on screen, it causes a very visible & detrimental impact in-game - our studio is making considerations to switch back to Shadowmap for the foreseeable future due to this.

9 Likes
#20

I would love to see this fixed in the near future. It leaves the ground looking flat and boring. While it is not a huge urgent issue, it gives very unsatisfying results.
Future:

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Shadowmap:

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7 Likes