Future Is Bright: Phase 2 Released

Low key shadowmap was better than GPUCascaded in the github demo -sips tea-

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In general shadowmap seems downgraded a ton from what we saw in FIB.

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This is gonna be an evolution to ROBLOX graphics. Bringing in new stages of realism. I have seen some small games put this to its extreme. I really hope to see this brought to use in big games.

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You can’t just expect new lighting to look the same way. What would be the point if it did? You really can’t just change the mode and expect it to look how you want.

I’ve recently started a new project and the new lighting is nothing but better, in most ways. It definitely isn’t darker than legacy lighting as long as you get your settings right.

One big thing to note with the new lighting is that newly created games have the brightness of Lighting set to 2. The default is no longer 1, and games require higher brightness to appear light than they used to.

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It is in fact darker. You can clearly see the loss of detail in darker shades. the Voxel screenshot is taken at brightness 2, Compatibility and Legacy are taken at brightness 1.5. It is perfectly reasonable to expect a new lighting system to not cause loss of detail in colour depth. This has been brought up a bunch of times over the last month.

An example applicable in my own game.
Compatibility:

Voxel @ brightness 3:

Notice the complete LOSS of colour difference and detail between the spikes and main armour plating. (difference of 5,5,5)
image

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FWIW the loss of detail for dark colors is unfortunately unavoidable. Don’t have time to explain this in detail atm, but it’s a side effect of the tone-mapping curve that looks more or less like this:

image

The dark colors (in the bottom) “flatten out”.
We tried to make a tonemapping curve that mostly removes this, but this makes it very hard to preserve hue/brightness for the medium range or compress the highlights (where colors are so bright you can’t represent them on a monitor). The current curve we’ve shipped is trying to preserve hue mid-range and compress highlights well, and dark colors had to suffer a bit.

This is the unfortunate side-effect of the whole “we need HDR and HDR requires a tone-mapper” sequence of decisions I’ve explained in Compatibility thread.

In the future we’re going to provide controls over the tonemapping curve that will allow you to affect the toe/shoulder areas explicitly, which will mean that you can effectively tune the “film” response however you like it for your game.

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Are there any temporary solutions to bring out the darker tones more?

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To be fair, we are in phase 2, not phase 3 in which we will get what was in FIB + better maybe.

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Yeah thats also true, but i hope it doesn’t turn out to be worse then FIB studio releases.

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The geometry for the HCZ tunnels are one sided or back faced culling or whatever.
https://i.imgur.com/XWzlL82.png can’t tell how thick they’re are but yeah backface culling stuff

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That’s the root cause of your issue then. Follow the steps here to fix it, and it should fix the lighting.

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I can’t wait for Phase 3 to start being accessible in Studio! It’ll be a field day for me once that starts.

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Those are wonderful! The future of Roblox is here.

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From what I hear it’s going to be a while.
Hopefully we get a new build of FIB before then.

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A late reply here, but this is an amazing update, and a much-needed update, really shows the capabilities a game has that has been here for over a decade and gives devs a much different artstyle to play with.

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Would you have plans to implement PBR materials into the engine soon?

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Pretty sure we’re getting specular maps later this year iirc.

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Hopefully we can get more than that, since theirs so much more potential to withdraw.

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Yep, I’d love PBR materials and Anistropic Filtering! Not to forget the legendary Phase 3, which is what I want the most.

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Not only that, before Phase 3 goes live, Roblox should have the option to utilize the GPU more, so less load can be put on the processor, and better multitasking.

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