Compatibility replacing Legacy on 17th of June 2019

Technology.Legacy will not be coming back ever. Did you not read what @zeuxcg said in the posts above? Sorry if this comes off as rude, but you need to read before you post. There are a number of reasons why Legacy is bad for Roblox (like a 5% performance decrease) which contribute to it’s removal.

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also, this was delayed specifically to work out the kinks in the system, so there’s been more than enough time to transition.

In other news, yay future :slightly_smiling_face:

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:wave: goodbye legacy, hello performance! i’ll miss your black neon though :pensive:
although i’m glad that the roblox team is going to keep the compatibility mode. at least all the old games won’t decompose even more by becoming pitch black.

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While it is a bit late I still disagree with this change and feel it should of been worked out from the visual bugs, I also see it pointless to reduce render times with this when popular games will use the other 2 lighting effects that have that extra render that was removed by this change, personally my players have been unhappy about the changes, however if the bugs can be fixed I’m sure it can be utilized better.

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I’m kinda disappointed with this,. There is a bit of a noticeable difference between the two lagacy looks good in different situations if not better,. I want to do a comparison between the two on one of my builds before it’s gone please

RIP Legacy
20XX - 2019
A loving and caring lighting engine
“He served us well”
He is survived by his 3 children: Compatibility, Voxel, and ShadowMap (and a fourth on the way)

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I know that this step is to improve Roblox, but I am really going to miss legacy. I had to work hard to successfully change all the lights of my game to look good with compatibility and I will really miss dark tones of neon, which I used a lot.

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I know that they’re trying their best to make compatibility as similar to legacy but the reflectance is significantly different. In compatibility, a slight reflectance makes the object look very shiny compared to legacy like if you put reflectance at 0.2 the object’s color gets more lighter especially black color. I hope they change the reflections a bit because some of the stuff I built look different due to reflections being changed

I think that this is helping the future of ROBLOX. I think Compatibility is a great option.

Some of you are complaining that ‘compatibility doesn’t look right’ or ‘it breaks the visual style of my game’. Now, I don’t want your games to look sucky (I’m a bit of a lighting nerd myself), but I don’t think you’re getting the idea of Compatibility fully.

Compatibility is not, and should not be, the lighting engine you design for. It’s a ‘quick fix’ to make sure that older games on Roblox which aren’t maintained don’t end up with wacky lighting under the new lighting models. You’re not meant to use it - it’s just the default option to make older places not-terrible.

The engineers and many of us have been saying this ever since the beginning: you should have started moving to Voxel and ShadowMap long ago. This isn’t some rushed change - you’ve had tons of forewarning, and tons of time to start switching. This was even delayed for a good while longer just to make sure all the bugs were gone.

We are tired of restating this - don’t rely on Compatibility, that’s not what it’s designed for! It’s not meant to look identical, it’s impossible for it to look identical, the engineers will not spend tons more time trying to make it more identical. New games should be using the new lighting engines, and there’s already solutions aplenty for your common issues while transitioning.

Use Voxel and ShadowMap. It’s nicer over here anyway :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hey. I cannot reproduce that problem that you are describing… In my tests legacy is brighter then Compatibility. (Yes we still have Legacy :slight_smile: internally for a while)

Could you please PM me the file with place that does have the repro? I know it may be hard without legacy now. But I’d like to investigate the issue. Or just provide more detail on how did you get the problem. Thanks :slight_smile:

This was the only case where I could get compatibility darker, but the difference is pretty subtle:

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I’m confused on how the difference is subtle.

With compatibility, you can see the skybox clearly, while with Legacy, you can barely see the skybox.

Perhaps it’s just my monitor, but Compatibility still looks worse than Legacy in a lot of places, mainly specular highlights & reflections.

For instance, Plastic looks blown out with Compatibility & all of the other current lighting modes, due to the entire face being hit by the sun being turned white.

The new lighting modes also lack pseudo bump mapping with textures & decals, which is quite unfortunate. I’m aware custom materials are coming, but not entirely sure how they’d be implemented. A new texture object with properties for a normal map, spec map, and albedo map, or is it a new object that puts said custom material all over the part like current materials operate?

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Well first I had to really mess around settings to get this picture (this is the worse case scenario), but overall yes, you are right. Yes compatibility may look worse in some cases.

Compatibility’s purpose is to not break the games as we remove legacy. We tried to make it as good as we could. Devs are encouraged to switch to voxel or shadowmap. Next stages of Future is bright will be compatible with them.

We are working on improving the reflections and specular highlight in voxel, shadowmap and what will come after.

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Can I assert that this means reflection probes are coming? :eyes:

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Honestly, I love the new lighting, seeing it on all games is amazing! It gives ROBLOX a fresh feel while keeping it what we all love, ROBLOX. Thanks for these great updates!

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One thing to be token from this message is that the new material system that was shown earlier this year will be shipping in phase 2.5

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:man_shrugging: I have tried all the lighting modes and legacy almost always wins…I think voxel lighting is cool but spending hours tweaking lighting properties, only to not be happy with the end results is for the birds. What do you mean making things look good was never the intent? I dislike the washed out compatibility look and feel that getting close to = falling short = fail! Legacy for life!!

Even with an understanding of why and the likability of some lighting models, I think Roblox should find a way to keep legacy and not pass additional work and costs to devs since developers develop developments developmentally. lol It’s part of the history of Roblox… I appreciate all the work that goes into making studio but still…

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I would have assumed it’s to do with the new material rendering system they teased a while back:

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I wish to say yes, but no they are not coming. Maybe in the future. The screenshot from the compatibility announcement was from phase 3, where probe-like reflection was analytic(local) light.

We are aware of this and it sucks for some people. But your game is playable in compatibility (unless your gameplay relies on the black neon) it just won’t look as good, or maybe it will, some people actually like compatibility… In the future you will have way more options on how your game can look and way more control than legacy could ever do… Just (please) stick with the compatibility if you dont like voxel and shadow maps for a bit longer and Im pretty sure that you will want to switch once they improve.

You can think about this way: Legacy could not move forward and we needed to introduce things like HDR, tonemapping and get rid of hacks that are not physically correct to move forward. There was no way to make it look same as legacy as the features in Voxel (like linear lighting) are just completely incompatible with Legacy

This graph, made by skilled artist with dysgraphia (me), shows that Legacy could not move forward, while voxel and beyond can.

Now with that established. We are going to add a lot more features, options and freedom to the engine. And you are now in maybe a little bit of “sucky” era of being stuck with compatibility until engine will catch up with what you want to have. I’m sure that new options will be great for everybody. Maybe we are not there for you, yet:

The point that I call creative freedom is when the engine features allows to create exactly what the dev wishes, even if it is Legacy look. So the “creative freedom” is personal as it is different for different people. Some people are already behind the hard time or even never had it, while for some it may take a while. But we will get there :slight_smile:

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