Compatibility replacing Legacy on 17th of June 2019

[PeZsmistic]

These quotes are relevant.

@ConvexRumbler

Having legacy in our code base has couple negative points

• We have to dedicate our engineering time to maintain the old code. We can use this time better, like working new features for You
• Having Legacy and Voxel is causing ~5% rendering slowdown across all platforms. Lets get those 5% percent back

@zeuxcg

We need to remove Legacy. It’s problematic because it requires us to maintain a lot of configurations that are fundamentally different from what we want to have; the need to be able to switch technology between games during teleports requires us to inject some code in the shaders that can seamlessly switch between “old” and “new” math even on lowest quality, and we pay a performance penalty for this.

@zeuxcg

we won’t spend much time testing legacy mode and might need to start introducing small breaking changes to optimize Voxel pipeline in places where two pipelines share code. This won’t happen immediately upon release of course, and we plan to keep Legacy around for some time, but at some point Legacy levels will start changing behavior.

These three posts by Zeuxcg are interesting if you’re curious why.

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…

Compatibility replacing Legacy on 17th of June 2019

The reason why system migration takes a while in Roblox is because usually, when you switch from one system to another, you’re going to have behavior differences; no matter how good or bad they are, they can break games. The games become unplayable. This is a problem. This usually doesn’t happen for rendering features - one day outlines will disappear from Roblox (sorry) but it’s hard to imagine many games that would become unplayable as a result. Lighting is different. There’s three common iss…