Compatibility Lighting becomes Retro Tone Mapping [Sunset + Migration]

[Ransomwavee (Ransomwave)]

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:

Compatibility replacing Legacy on 17th of June 2019

So let me start by saying that we actually read things that you post Feedback is welcome, even if it’s negative (but please be polite and respectful of the work we’ve done), but keep in mind that we may disagree with some of it and as a result not act on it. Why did we introduce Compatibility if it’s so obviously different than Legacy and looks worse? Well, looking better was never the point of Compatbility. Let me walk you through the decisions we’ve made and explain why we made them. …

Compatibility replacing Legacy on 17th of June 2019

Ok, so the real difference in Voxel is that it’s a different mathematical foundation. Rendering pipelines are like 50% math; by changing the fundamental assumptions about the color space you work in, you have to redo a lot of the work. We had to very substantially change the water shading for example because the way things were done before were effectively hacked together up until they look right; it’s harder to do this when the underlying foundation is sane, you have to be more rigorous about y…

@OROSEMIFAN_OGDev

For developers who want to build games with that classic, nostalgic vibe, the removal of these settings feels like a restriction. Not every game needs to look super realistic. Some of us are actually aiming for that old-school feel because it connects us to the past and to why we loved Roblox in the first place.

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.