A comparison between Compatibility and Voxel + Retro Tone Mapping
Compatibility:
Voxel + Retro Tone Mapping:
this is now my suggestion, could you make an effect which limits how much light be in one place? (like compatibility) or something similar (like eyes adjusting)?
Hey there @Radmilo_Carevic!
By that, do you mean being able to lower brightness in specific areas? Or like the brightness clamp from Compatibility?
Is there a way to make more pronounced interior shadows with Voxel + Shadowmap lighting?
Compatibility
Converted Voxel
Attempted Shadow Map Fix (lighting from the ceiling and from a light source)
Observe that there’s no shadow behind the character or from the structure.
Shadow Map, no ceiling
There’s no real way I can find to get the character’s shadow back aside from removing the ceiling, which is not ideal.
2 Likes
i meant brightness clamp, like a property in Lighting instance which immediately affects all light sources and when light reaches the limit, it then affects it’s range. and if possible, to make a property which allows the size of the roof or BasePart affect how dark is in that area, like in Compatibility, because I believe merging old features and new features can introduce something greater which allows developers to make even better games.
i have another suggestion, which are colored shadows and colored light rays, so like, when light rays goes through transparent (BasePart.Transparency<1) then it gets colored. i ask this so i could improve realism of my game. and for shadows, could you do color and transparency of it so i could recreate roblox experience from 2010s. thank you!
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Frankly you seem to be pretty uneducated on why options like Compatibility or Legacy were taken out off the engine in the first place.
Please read the statements made by the former engineer who was on the team that removed Legacy in favor of Compatibility, back in 2019. He goes pretty in-depth as to why your proposal is unfeasable:
I am also the only developer behind a game that has an old roblox aesthetic and was built from the ground-up using Compatibility (mostly because, when I started back work on it in 2022, I was conviced by people like you to believe Compatibility looked more “retro”). I managed to adapt all of the lighting of my game to the new system in less than an hour (I mostly spent time toning down very bright Lights).
You can’t possibly justify clogging up the Roblox client with useless features like Legacy lighting because someone on a YouTube Short told you old Roblox was better.
Old games looking bad come from the fact that Compatibility (and Legacy) were fundamentally primitive and people had to adapt to the awful resources they had using hacky workarounds. This isn’t good practice, your projects shouldn’t be built on “hacky workarounds” even if that’s what you’re used to.
During the development of my game, I was faced with issues after more issues because of Compatibility’s showing age (and technical debt since it was supposed to replace Legacy). Once you take on an actual serious project, you will quickly realize how bad Compatibility actually was.
Additionally, you can pretty much still achieve “the old Roblox look” without having such an inherently bad system clogging up the engineer’s jobs at Roblox (again, I migrated my game and nothing changed but the lighting being easier to work with and looking more reliable and consistent).
I’m not writing this specifically for you (although I found it so funny you started the petition), but rather for the 10s of other people on this thread complaining about similar things you’re putting on the table here. We can do better, guys - let’s not get stuck in some romanticized version of the past.
6 Likes
@LightBeamRays Will there be a property that disables anisotropic occupancy?
Future Is Bright: Phase 1 Released - Updates / Announcements - Developer Forum | Roblox
On the voxel front, our lighting grid now uses anisotropic occupancy (which is short for "in each voxel we track more data to know more about the geometry occlusion properties”), which allows us to handle thin parts much nicer
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Compatibility
Voxel Migration with ColorGradingMode & adjusted lights
This looks nothing like compatibility, how am I supposed to replicate the lighting now?
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Maybe you should adjust bloom effect a bit. Is this an old screenshot? as far as I know compatibility has been unavailable for a few weeks
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Nope, all taken within the latest version of studio.
I was able to force Lighting.Technology to Compatibility.
I’ve tried to mess around with the bloom effect but even so, that doesn’t help much.
In fact I didn’t have time to look at many things in compatibility before it came, can you tell me how you did it? regarding brightness, you can also reduce the brightness of lights to 1
I’ve reduced the lights too.
You can open a file in studio that still has compatibility, insert a part and spam undo, and you’ll get it back.
@LightBeamRays we need to have a property in lightning that allows us to have all the old lightning features: old neon glow (like black glow), old neon colors, old shadows, and just allow us to get back the feel of roblox we liked Cmon this is part of your game history you can’t just let it go away like that… you guys could make it as a post processing effect that overlap on bloom, tonemap, it could have many options to replicate the old feeling that a big portion of the community liked and miss. Please…
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Old neon colors are basically reproduced by ColorGradingEffect, except for the dark halo of light around the part. This is because the neon material shader used to work differently. I wrote about it:
I am infact needing the way of old neon used to look for many of my projects but since they destroyed neons when they removed legacy theres no way for me to replicate the old neons.
old studio:
new studio:
Please note this has been converted
(it just looks trash old neons were better)
3 Likes
I kind of figured out how the neon material shader worked. It brightened the given color a bit, and then applied a blur effect to the part. This made all colors glow regardless of brightness, even black. (I figured this out just by looking at how neon looks on low and high graphics in old and new studio. The neon color is darker on low graphics in new studio.) so if you want to reproduce the old neon color, you should set the color settings higher, it’s better to do it with the old studio window open and compare, but YES, you won’t be able to reproduce the “old glow” (which was actually a blur). overall I agree with you, roblox should either give us access to own shaders or give us the ability to use existing ones more widely, like applying a blur to a material, recreating the old neon. Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to share the results of my research over the last few days😅
and no old neon colors are not replicated by colorgradingeffect i am forced to take others colors to get the exact color i need
because of this issue they are limiting us (developers and users) (who give them money) the ability of making our projects like we want.
its not that difficult to add a lightning technology based on voxel engine
that replicates legacy because compatibility was running on voxel engine so they had absolutely no reasons to remove it other than annoy us and not giving a proper replacement to it
and the same issue happens with bloom we don’t want to have one post processing effect that affects ALL of our objects emitting glow (neon, lights) there should be an effect that affects lights, one that affects neon’s and one for both (the current bloom we have)