Deprecating Lighting.Legacy, Introducing Lighting.Compatibility

Voxel isn’t leaving anytime soon, most likely. They have to compensate for lower-end machines and mobile devices. Not everyone has top-tier or mid-tier machines that can run Roblox at maximum graphics quality. It probably also comes down to developer preference too. Someone might prefer Voxel over the new shadowmap/voxel hybrid (but seriously, who would lol).

In a perfect world, everyone would have an RTX 2080ti and other capable hardware and be able to run SUPER DUPER HIGH-FIDELITY GRAFIX GAMES!!!1111, but this is definitely not a perfect world and people still have their dad’s hand-me-down PC from like 10 years ago.

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Yes, I understand roblox Might update Voxel (And the probably have to anyway), and yes… I do have a low end machine (Without any graphics card), and the lowEST roblox graphics setting(s).

Lol true.

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I’m not sure if it’s me or that Compatibility looks like the middle of Voxel and Legacy.

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It looks cool! I want to see it in my game soon :smiley:

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Just to be clear about supported phases long term.

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.

We do not intend to remove Voxel or, by extension, Compatibility any time soon. These two are going to be the only two modes that have lighting look consistent across quality levels and platforms. On the bright side, this means that you can design your lighting once and have it look exactly the same, modulo different distance, everywhere - which is great for games that are mobile first for example, and in general helps if you want to design your lighting for the strengths of one lighting system.

We will be shipping more lighting technology options for you in the future - the first one will be coming to Studio really really soon, and will extend Voxel with beautiful crisp sun shadows. In that sense, migrating to Voxel helps because you’ll stay on the “supported” track where each new technology release is an incremental improvement over the previous one. However we recognize the fact that many people are attached to the specific look and we tried to make Compatibility for this - it’s not perfect, sadly, but we can’t afford to keep a perfect emulation mode.

Finally, thank you for all the feedback - it’s not an easy transition because we’re taking something that stayed basically constant for the last 6 years or so, and reimagining it to be more physically accurate and, in many cases, to look better - this invariably means that some content that was designed for the strengths of the old system looks worse. It’s all going to be worth it in the end - lighting updates are going to continue throughout this year.

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I agree! Considering that if Compatibility ever gets updated, I just change my bloom, and sunray’s properties / settings to make it match (Or get closer) to what I like. And if legacy is problematic on your end (Considering that roblox makes this available to developers) I suggest roblox removes it, then move on.

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Oh hey! Sorry for the late reply, I had been busy in real life. Alright so, it really depends on which integrated GPU you have, which processor you have and the RAM. 4.2 GB might not be able to run it smoothly in all games when it comes out, hopefully with a 64-bit client. I tested out two places and saw that a normal little map ran just fine, but when I switched over to another place (which was the Suburban template with realistic trees and realistic, custom textures on the roads) I saw that my RAM usage was constantly at the maximum which the Future is Bright v16 Studio can currently (Will be changed to 64-bit in the next release, v17 I think) utilize, which is 4 GB, then crashed after a few seconds. I’ll be able to test more freely once v17 with 64-bit comes out, as I’ll be able to see if it was a RAM issue (I have 16 GB) or something else.

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Update:

  • You can now publish games in the compatibility mode.
  • You still have at least couple of weeks before we force all legacy games to compatibility. The exact dates will be announced. You will have enough time to adjust when we announce firm date.
  • We are shipping improvements for compatibility. This update will decrease the intensity of the specular highlight, that is messing up colors for many of your games.

Thanks for all the posts here. We did read each and every one of them and tried to improve compatibility as much as we can for you based on the feedback.

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So this means we can now use Technology.Compatibility with the client/in published Roblox games? Cool. I’ll be using Voxel but this will be nice for those who want to emulate the look of Legacy.

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Yes that is what I meant. You can start publishing your games in compatibility mode right now. Edited the post to be more clear

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Oh man this is gonna be really good. I owe you my life for this.

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Agreed, sunrise + sunset are very dark for some odd reason. Personally it makes my games look unrealistic.

Consider fine-tuning your lighting with a ColorCorrection effect. You could also investigate changing the brightness of the texture for your skybox.

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This is a really good change and i am looking forward to see how this goes!

However, i think the neon glow has kinda gone in compatibility when compared to legacy

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There is some weird glitches with skyboxes

compatibility

Legacy

Voxel

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Is it possible to get the same lighting effect as using Legacy when using Voxel?

Well Voxel lighting as a totally different technology then legacy. Your best bet is to use compatibility, if you want to keep the legacy look. You probably know this.

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I have a bad computer, and my graphics are all the way down, But the lower my graphics settings are the less sun-rays are emitting from the sun. Could roblox please make it so when using Voxel the sun-rays appear no matter what?

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I’m probably going to have to use compatibility even though it still isn’t perfect, I don’t exactly like the look of voxel… However, I’m happy you guys are making changes!

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Ooooh, I really wanna make holographic sights even if it is just a single dot with parallax, is there a way to make the reflections still appear and not be dependent on transparency? That could also help with other trippy effects.

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