Better Indoor Reflections - Live for Future Lighting

This is an amazing feature, you love to see it. On the other hand I have a bit of criticism about this, please allow the Developers to have more control over the game engine, let us disable features we don’t want, for example disabling this feature and having all the others on. Many other engines give the Developers way more control over which features they want in game and which features they do not, having a category of properties for stuff like this would solve so many complaints other Developers are having.

Having such options/properties is already possible AND available, take for example how we can enable and disable beta features. I think you could do something similar for the other features in the engine.

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For people who think that it’s ray tracing, read these, it’s not.

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Well said. The quality of the updates we get varies to an unacceptable degree. We’ll get outstandingly polished features like the new pivot system that comes with built-in studio tools and it’s own scripting API, then we’ll get half-baked, half thought out, unusable and FORCED tech like this. Outrageous for a company of this scale.

Why do you bother asking for feedback if you’re going to ignore and disregard 100% of it? I’d like an answer from those who worked on this feature, which according to the post is @ConvexRumbler and @programeow. Why was this a beta feature for four whole months when you did not, and had no plan of heeding a single iota of developer feedback? Why?

Yes, this post is harsh. And in my opinion it’s well deserved. This feature is very obviously unfinished and is not production ready, yet we’re being forced to use it. And finally, I honestly don’t know how many times I need to repeat myself, but ROBLOX DOES NOT GET A SAY IN THE ART DIRECTION OF MY GAME. I DO. Unbelievable.

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They improved something, of course it’s not going to be polished on release, that’s why it’s in beta.

My jaw is now dislocated! Good job, Roblox!

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Your views have certainly changed…

Only a few months earlier… (RC material build thread)

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My point was about him supporting Roblox changing the art “direction” of every game via the forced material update, but suddenly opposing it for the indoor reflection update.

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In my opinion these two updates are mostly unrelated, but I respect your opinion.
The material update was cancelled until a solution to forcing the new materials can be found.

I don’t necessarily find this update bad, but I can see how it can upset people using Future lighting.

@programeow
I appreciate engineers are trying out new stuff to improve the engine as a whole. I just don’t think forcing updates like this without letting devs test it first is a good idea.

For one, the feature can be buggy. I’m sure the engineers do their best to find bugs, but they can simply not detect them at the scale at which developers can (due to the amount of devs).
We can also provide important feedback on the feature before it is released.

I don’t see any reason why it would be beneficial to instantly enable a feature like this.

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I think it’s a bit lame to force this to Future lighting only instead of offering a setting to enable it on Voxel, Shadowmap, and Future. Is there some technical limitation for why it can’t be simply turned off, or why it can’t work on any other lighting mode? IIRC, it didn’t work quite as well on Voxel, but it still had a noticeable effect.

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As someone who uses AnimationController frequently as a full replacement for Humanoids, I am hoping that there will be some way to filter certain models or objects. Either with increased render fidelity or ideally not part of the environment reflection at all. Looks great so far though guys!

The head of my robot is peaking through in the reflection and updates every few seconds with low quality.

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I fail to see a reason why we are not allowed to implement our own environment probes. I am aware that Roblox is telling the engineers what to do and that you have no say over it, but I do not see any reason behind not simply implementing a class that inherits from the Attachment object, with more properties to customize probe detection with.

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this looks way better than the way it did previously. i wanna see what other technologies you’re gonna add for higher quality!

Maybe this is one step to mirrors

What do the reflections on smooth terrain water run on then? Is that not SSR? Why shouldn’t that option be available for players that do have high-end devices? This is great for devices with weaker specs, but why restrict those who can do more?

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water reflects the skybox, not the screen

No it definitely reflects more than just the sky.

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This is true if you’re using mobile hardware or if you’re on anything below graphics level 8 - on gfx level 8 and above terrain water uses screen space reflections and the skybox.

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In most cases you’ll have a lot more parts than bodies of water so I’m pretty certain applying screen space reflections to every part in a scene would tank performance a ton. SSR for certain parts would work well, and I do hope it comes in the future, but for now I think environment maps are a more feasible solution even on higher end hardware

Also iirc the SSR on water has a lot of artefacts that are normally covered up by the water’s normal maps. Water is also rendered under one shader, so I’m sure that also makes porting water reflections to parts. ("Reflectance" should be able to reflect Surrounding Areas and Environmental Instances - #7 by tnavarts)

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I agree 100%. There needs to be a manual system for making non-Humanoid characters not be reflected.

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This is an excellent point, actually. I hadn’t thought of this. Roblox ALREADY supports SSR for smooth terrain water so the high-end devices excuse isn’t particularly valid. Not to mention: So what? If only more beefy hardware can handle it, then only enable it on higher graphics settings. It’s that simple. Countless other graphical features work this way, including Future lighting itself. I don’t accept the notion that we can’t have nice things because Roblox wants to support mobile phones from 8 years ago (obviously hyperbole but you get the idea).

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