dont get me wrong but i think some materials looked cooler back then c:
(ice)
8 Likes
old lighting was so hacky back then, you could’ve used transparent neon to blur screens, good times
7 Likes
This is just plain wrong. Compatibility, as outlined several times by former rendering engineer zeuxcg in 2019, was explicitly designed to be a part of the FiB rendering engine, as they could not afford to maintain Legacy. I have also seen decompiled engine code that shows that the bulk of the changes Compatibility make are extremely low-cost. Removing it is an absurdity and directly contradicts the reasons given when it was first added.
Yes, it has been long-requested that developers can no longer clamp the brightness of their lights and shadows to more temperate levels. Totally!
6 Likes
I knew there was something off about that paragraph lol
I was afraid this would happen sooner or later.
Once again, Roblox announces that it will remove another much-used feature with only a half-baked replacement available for people to use.
Correcting colours (or, as an aesthetical preference, disabling HDR) is only one part of the reason some developers continue to use Lighting.Compatibility. Believe it or not, some of us actually like its clamping behaviour for lights and decreased shadow intensity! If you are to go through with this, at a minimum, we need settings to clamp light brightness and shadow intensity to our preferred visual preference.
Removing functionality with limited or for some purposes, borderline no replacement at all, is NOT the definition of making ““improvements”” to your lighting system. The whole reason Compatibility exists at all and was even created is because it was low-cost to maintain compared to the Legacy lighting code stack.
If the Roblox of 2024 cannot maintain “low-cost” features introduced by the Roblox of 2019 any longer, why should developers maintain their commitment to the platform?
No. Once again you’re pushing forward with a change that nobody asked for that threatens to cripple the aesthetical design painstakingly devised by developers over the course of the past 11 years since Dynamic Lighting was first introduced.
Roblox must introduce functionality that restores the ability to clamp light brightness whilst expanding the light radius, and ensure that the achieved result is 1:1 with what we could already accomplish before this pointless removal.
Worth noting that since the technology was first introduced, it was already massively levelled down from its accuracy to Legacy in early 2020, so I guess Roblox never were all that committed to what they told developers at the time anyway. Great way to double down on what has been an objectively poor year for developers and players alike…
So why remove it? Compatibility merely disables aspects of Voxel internally. Some of us are old enough to remember that this much was made clear in 2019:
Evidently, shadows also look worse in the post-migration part of this as a result of force-enabling anisotropic occupancy. Again, you seem to forget that many people choose compatibility because of the behaviour it has with lights and shadows.
Overall, great work guys! Superb way to re-affirm your commitment to developers at a time when… Oh, people are already losing faith in you.
Cruel and unneeded change at any cost appears to be the trend of 2024.
34 Likes
Yet another useless update, WHY?? It can be very difficult to replicate what compatibility looks like with voxel. Please think before you go through with this, or create something more similar.
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If this change enables you to build out other features of the lighting engine like making realistic lighting better, I find it a good update.
Games who will have the most work with this change are probably classic style games with huge maps and lighting.
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Oh neat, I actually love the way voxel lighting looks, I’ve been wanting to recreate it in a different game engine just for the fun of it.
How does voxel lighting work actually?
I couldn’t find much information about it when I searched for it.
It’s cheap to compute and it makes lighting look very stylized.
I recall that computing voxel lighting is so cheap and fast that it can even be done on the CPU.
Compatibility Lighting, with all of these lights having a brightness of 5
Voxel Lighting + Migration changes, same brightness
Voxel Lighting + Migration changes, and lights adjusted in an attempt to look like how it was in Compatibility
It doesn’t have the same effect I was going for. I’m trying to achieve a similar style of light & light colors that certain games like Garry’s Mod (and by extension, the Source Engine) use, but having to switch to Voxel, even with the migration implementations, doesn’t make it feel the same now.
The purple lights in this castle were based off of the lights in the rp_richland map, especially the purple bath-tub (don’t have any images for that):
What can I do to fix these lights? One user replied that I just have to change the bloom, but I don’t use a significant amount of bloom that would cause this, rather Voxel likes to severely magnify and create a glowing effect on parts that have a bright light on them, and I can’t remove that glow effect without turning down the light’s brightness significantly.
5 Likes
I was so hyped when i read color grading (Thinking we got much more color grading options) only to find out its filter presets 
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The people complaining are the exact reason why the Roblox engine is like 20 years behind everything else.
The year is 2024, we NEED better graphics. Not some 2010 compatibility garbage that makes games look worse than a DS Lite (if anyone here is even old enough to have had one).
7 Likes
Could this be the beginning of a series of upgrades eventually finally giving us a larger radius for lights?
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The issue is that not everybody that makes a game wants to use Future Lighting, some people choose shadowmap, voxel or even compatibility just because they fit the style of their game more or because they just prefer the technology.
Roblox’s lighting engine has changed a lot with the FIB project but a lot of games simply dont change over to the newest lighting either because the owner doesn’t care about updating the game anymore or because the owner simply doesnt think that the newer engines fit the game (or just isnt bothered to change).
I wont go against Roblox recieving better graphics as long as they’re 100% optional since there are a lot of devices that cant render advanced graphics such as Volumetric lighting at a high distance real time setting.
From what i know at least half of Roblox users are playing on a phone/tablet, most of these devices are not as capable as normal desktop PCs and they would not be able to render the graphics that pc users would be able to.
Another issue with Roblox is that the graphics settings are way too simple for what the platform is now, a slider could work for an overall, quick change but we will soon need some sort of advanced settings like in other games (Fortnite, Apex Legends, etc…) so that users that arent on the most powerful or recent hardware could turn down the settings that are more resource demanding and still be able to (for example) see more than 30 meters in front of them while not having to render the realistic sun shadows.
Roblox is kind of in a tough spot regarding lighting improvements at the moment.
(Sorry if i sound aggressive towards you, that isnt my intention)
11 Likes
Pretty poor logic.
Not everyone wants their game to look ultra realistic. People like the old lighting because it can genuinely look nicer and be more fitting to whatever their game is.
High quality graphics are a great thing to add to the platform but they shouldn’t be forced like you clearly want here.
Also important to mention people aren’t complaining about the removal of the mode itself because it’s just being moved to the new “tone mapper” instance as a preset.
They’re complaining about things the preset cannot provide like brightness clamping. (making your reply moreorless irrelevant)
11 Likes
The main issue that i have with the tonemapper is the brightness not being capped, which will have unintended effects in games like Flood Escape 1, Retrostudio and Work at a Pizza Place.
There’s the darker and overall more apparent shadows too, which make previously lit up areas completely dark.
Other than that, the tonemapper is still bittersweet for me but its better than nothing.
1 Like
Not every game wants to look ultra realistic, and Compatibility was one of, if of THE best thing they’ve done for preserving their older games on the platform, back when it used to be a “Online Building Toy”.
The removal of Compatibility is damaging the work they’ve done to keep these older games the way they originally were, if this new retro tone mapping thing doesn’t fix all the problems it has currently (More shadows than Compatibility + Lights being messed up) then this will, in my opinion; be a major problem.
I know ROBLOX cares about it’s older games, they have to… right? They helped make ROBLOX be ROBLOX. Without them, you wouldn’t be here. 2016 was the main reason why ROBLOX is as big as it is today.
But, that’s just my opinion.
12 Likes
RetroStudio already started using this new voxel tone mapper, many games made in it that use lights will have to adjust every single one.
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I’m aware of this, i’ll have to go back and look at my creations in there.
Now that i think about it though, couldn’t Retrostudio make a script that checks for lights that have a brightness value greater than 1 and cap it? Retrostudio doesnt have an executable studio, its running on an actual place.
1 Like
yo can you please add the “Outlines” property back in lightings from 2018 please it was really goated
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