As a developer its currently hard to use atmospheric fog in low-mid density fog situations using atmospheric fog.
The new fog looks more realistic, but this means that it starts immediately. When I only want a slight haze that ends at around 1500 studs to make the map look more infinite and focusing on whats close and hiding places yet to be explored, I still have to set the fog to a density where close surroundings look noticeably washed out, the alternative would be to set the fog to a more realistic density, but this would have the end distance extended to at least 5000 studs, which usually doesnt cover the entire map, as practically no roblox maps are at 1:1 scale with reality and also because of the stylized nature of roblox games.
This issue was already solved with the previous FogStart for the old fog and just setting it to values around 200-400 has made a massive improvement with a lot more contrast and vibrance.
Support! I’ve been wanting the Atmospheric fog that was introduced 1-2 months ago to have something similar to the old fog engine with FogStart.
Anyway, having this implied and affect what the fog Density starts from a certain point for all characters like 100 or 220 it would become more useful and beneficial as one of my projects has a massive world and sometimes I need to change the Density to a lower/higher size and range a lot when it comes to a specific region like a forest to the lava pits and changing the haze sometimes.
Same here, it is very difficult for me and other developers who use this in their games to measure and use this when it comes to something similar from the old fog engine to the new one. However if the density of the fog lowers then the quality of the fog and haze looks horrible, maybe they could possibly do something about it?
Sure the Atmospheric fog is great and overall better than the old one but I do believe having a point where the fog starts on a specific spot from multiple players, it will be beneficial and helpful to measure these types of fogs onto our games.
Anywho, I do believe they should add something like the old FogStart on the old fog engine to the new Atmospheric fog!
I was just about to make a feature request for this! This is quite literally the only blocker keeping me from using atmosphere in my games.
As a developer I use FogEnd and FogStart properties to hide and show far away objects. These properties have real value in the design for my game and are critical to being able to hide far away things the player shouldn’t see. I have to resort to using large inverted meshes to blend sky and fog but this allows me to keep distance control over fog distance.
Atmosphere is far better looking and it lets me not use the inverted sphere trick but lacks these two critical distance properties. I cannot easily define distances where the atmosphere effect should begin and reach the maximum effect range and so I cannot use it in replacement for fog.
If Roblox were to add these properties (or some form of them) it would grant developers more control over atmosphere and allow us to stop relying on ugly tricks and “hacks” to get smooth transitioning skies and pseudo atmospheres.
I want to use atmospheres to make the loading in of new procedurally generated terrain seamless, but when I do this the distance you can see is hugely reduced. Adding the ability to define when fog starts would fix this
Still running into this blocker with Atmosphere. Distance controls like FogEnd and FogStart are desperately needed.
It’s incredibly frustrating that there are tradeoffs required to use upgrades to older systems. Having to sacrifice functionality and user experience (visibility issues) really sucks.
Absolutely agree. Atmosphere objects look amazing, but it lacks this, which I’d consider a critical feature for its useability. As it is currently, you’re either stuck with barely any fog or too much fog, and you don’t get control over visibility.
Hard disagree here. One of the main selling points of atmospheric fog is that it correctly simulates fog density over distance as an actual atmosphere would. That’s why the property is called “Density.”
Real fog doesn’t just “start” at an arbitrary distance away from you.
I guess it’s a good thing we’re making video games and not dioramas then. “Real” behavior makes this feature hard to use, it needs more control points.
Realism is a bogus excuse to “hard disagree” with a feature request that would make something work better for more people. I’m not trying to make realistic depictions of things, I’m trying to make a game.
Then atmospheric fog is not for you. There’s already a way to apply arbitrary amounts of fog to a scene. Use that one. You don’t need a second way to do the same exact thing.
But I can’t do the exact same thing, that’s why I want to use atmosphere. I can’t mimic the haze and glare effects of atmosphere with fog. I can’t blend fog into the skybox, I can only attempt to color match it. I can’t have two color tones with fog.
Atmospheric fog is the feature I want to use but can’t because it doesn’t have enough control points. I don’t know if you’ve forgotten what part of the forum you’re in but feature requests are made when some part of the API is lacking or is missing something entirely. This constitutes as that.
Then just don’t use this option if it becomes available? Believe it or not, perfect realism is not always what’s needed when making video games on a platform where the characters are made of blocks, and having more visual options (especially ones that are simple to add) is always a big plus. Real fog also doesn’t look like the sky, so it’s not like Atmosphere is ACTUALLY realistic.
Having the ability to use the much-improved color & skybox visuals of Atmospheres over Fog and not have denser fog completely obscure the player’s view or make the immediate surroundings appear as the skybox would be great.
There is always a balancing act between physical realism and artist control in engine design. Game engines are meant to support art direction and game functionality, not be a perfect simulation of the real world. If you want that, you belong in scientific computing.
The old fog is legacy, it is not good enough. The new atmosphere is amazing, but we need some kind of falloff control because it is simply too pervasive; players cannot see anything in high density atmosphere and at a moderate density it completely obscures large scenic expanses and environments when you only want it to soften the horizon, making it effectively unusable for a large number of use-cases with no wiggle room.
Would love to see this happen to Atmosphere. I expected it to come quickly after release but have been sad to see few updates to Atmosphere. It’d be a graphical improvement in Jailbreak having this feature. Right now Atmosphere makes the immediate terrain too hazy.
Still supporting almost two years later. I’m making a game set in a tropical setting and was having issues reducing the “coldness” of the visuals until I just recently realized that the Atmosphere’s fog is what causes the environment to look so blue, even on close objects & buildings. The intention I had when using Atmosphere was to hide StreamingEnabled LODs and to add to the sense of scale, but the atmosphere spreads a little too much for my liking and needs, which would be resolved if this was a feature.
