In many cases blur can be an essential mechanic of a game and the developer might want to force it regardless of how it would affect a player’s performance.
EDIT: Perhaps, instead of forcing it, we could have it for all graphics settings but it looks prettier for higher settings and the lower settings get a dumbed-down version that still gets the functionality part taken care of.
Two Examples Of Use:
1.Blur when poisoned/cursed
-It can be used as a perk in a game to deteriorate another player’s vision.
2.Blur to hide a certain object before it’s unlocked etc.
-In a shop where the camera is used, higher level items that the developer might not want to show to the player could be blurred to keep them mysterious.
Blurring is disabled on lower graphics levels for good reason – not much help that your screen is blurred due to poison if you’re getting 10 fps on a mobile device. That being said, I think we need a low-quality blur that doesn’t look as pretty (could be a pre-rendered image overlay for instance) to ensure performance standards are met but gameplay doesn’t suffer.
This (not just blur) is really important. I use these effects to screw with the players screen when they get damaged and as a result players on lower-end PC’s don’t see much of an impact at all.
Some sort of dumbed-down version for lower versions would be 10/10
This might be the wrong thing to ask for, seeing as blur can be infeasible when you’re chugging along at 20 FPS. One option would be for Roblox to make the blur look worse on low quality levels instead of cutting it entirely.
We would be able to work around this quite easily without bugging the graphics engineers if there was a way to get the real rendered quality level (e.g. deprecate SavedQualitySetting.Automatic). That would let us tell whether BlurEffects are being applied so that we could use a fallback effect when they aren’t.
Edited the post seeing that a better solution would be to have a dumbed-down version of blur for lower-settings and the super-pretty version for higher settings.
Idk if it would be possible to produce a blur that isn’t embarrassingly bad for lower performance costs but I imagine it is possible.
Not that I disagree with him, but if your computer struggles to essentially run 2010 Crossroads, you should be left behind. That has to be in the bottom 1% surely, that’s a terrible computer.
If they aren’t bottom 1% then that’s a different story but if they are. Then I need to force it, since then people can “cheat” out by changing to graphics setting 1.
Added: “My dad’s old laptop” is a very popular thing for our players.
Also, I’d suggest against using post-processing as a defining gameplay element. Pretty much like particles, and other graphics stuff. In general, most (non-roblox) games tend to avoid having game logic depend on graphics state.
So, lets say there is supposed to be disorientation under certain conditions, which is supposed to be a blur. The player gets the graphics setting using UserSettings().GameSettings.SavedQualityLevel to determine whether or not the player’s computer can handle the blur, and use a fallback system if it can’t. Only one problem: when the graphics mode is Automatic, that property becomes completely useless. Depending on how the fallback was programmed, a player whose automatic graphics chose level 10 would see the fallback graphics, or a player whose automatic graphic chose level 1 would not see any blur or fallback system. This is a blind spot in the API that is inhibiting things like this.
For how long will the people with 2004 machines and a gigabyte of junkware be supported though? After a while, those players just have to get decent computers if they want to play all the games roblox has to offer with a good framerate, developers shouldnt be held back from useful features that most fans can support.
I think blur currently appears at graphics setting 5 and I think a lot of people still run below that and it doesn’t tkae a 2004 machine to run there. A PC from 2009 would probably struggle (if it wasn’t beefed out then) and now as the number of households buying new PCs is decreasing as mobile becomes more popular, supporting older PCs might be important.
