As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard/impossible to make certain areas of my map appear really dark. I must resort to hacks like black neon or a bunch of transparent parts to achieve the desired effect.
Ideally, we would have some official way to make dark shadows appear without necessarily having parts. Something that looks like this:
What are you suggesting for the “official way?” In real life, shadows/dark places are caused when there is little to no lighting in an area.You could do the same, by having your entire map lighting pretty dark, then through the reverse way – adding lights to keep an area lit.
Basically, rather than trying to make an area dark, try to keep places that you don’t want dark… well lit.
As Roblox Staff say:
So, I suggest you tackle shadows and dark areas the way you would realistically.
I updated the post. Also, I think Roblox should give us the option to do this instead of forcing us to use a lighting system that is awesome but not perfect for all games.
The idea of putting pointlights around the entire map is really bad to me. Not only will they not look like realistic light (Ironic since Roblox wants the lighting to look more realistic), it would be horrible placing pointlights everywhere just to get this effect.
I would really like an official way to just cast shadows or something rather than rely on hacks like the one above anymore. I’d hate for the day Roblox randomly decides to stop supporting it to come again.
There will be the option to switch between FIB and the current lighting engine.
FIB will also do a much better job at making dark areas really look dark. Just trust me on that.
I think there are ways you can work around it if so. If you want “darkness” to resonate from a hallway, then you might be able to use a particle effect to add some fuzzy shading to the edges of the part.
As awesome as it is, it’s still not exactly what I want. I really want an official way to make things like hallways and entrances that the player can’t go into as dark as I want without having to add tons of parts and other hacks.
Well, I don’t think the rendering team is changing their mind in this regard.
In order to move forward and innovate, compromises have to be made. They might find ways to address your issue though, stay tuned.
Negative lights are somewhat common in video game engines. They are used for similar things like what you are suggesting. However hacks like this are not really the direction that we are heading. Dont get me wrong, Im not saying that everything is (or will be) perfectly physically based, but its a goal.
Really dark cave can be achieved simply by lowering the ambient light and increasing outdoor ambient. That should end up as a quite dark cave with transition of light disappearing from the entrance.
That is not what you are asking for though. I think for that doing a hack of transparent parts is actually quite legit. If you need caves that are super dark right at the entrance… do it … But I dont see us doing official support for dark cave entrances in the lighting system.
Piece of advice from rendering engineer: Stacked up transparent parts, especially those that will be covering almost entire screen can really hurt perf on lower end devices, like phones, tablets or crappy computers.
If you are using this effect try to use as little transparent parts as possible to achieve your artistic goal.
(just making sure: what I have just said does not apply for the opaque parts at all)
… But I dont see us doing official support for dark cave entrances in the lighting system.