Future lighting recently came out, and it looks absolutely fantastic. Developers everywhere have started to use it in their creations, and it overall has made the platform look extremely well polished. The major issue with this is that lower-end devices cannot handle Future lighting, and when they go to change their graphics settings, it also adjusts other parts of the game like render distance.
For most small games, this is not too big of an issue. Render distance to some games can be sacrificed, and nobody will be able to tell a difference. In contrast, in games like Mad City, render distance is crucial and lighting settings are not nearly as important.
A screenshot of the lowest graphics level in the game Mad City
As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to build in depth immersive experiences at a large scale without the power to customize individual graphics levels. We are forced to use lower levels of technology to account for lower end devices instead of giving users the option to customize their experience individually. I propose that Roblox allows users to have the option to customize their graphics levels individually instead of customizing all of their graphics on a slider.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because we would be able to create better experiences for higher end computers without sacrificing lower end devices. More options to customize would give players an overall better experience in large scale games like ours.
This applies to any other feature really, everything is too restricted and accomplishing new things here is virtually impossible, given the fact that Roblox doesn’t let us control the core mechanics in Roblox’s engine or create new ones.
Yes! This is something I’ve been wanting for a long time.
Here are what some of the settings could be:
Shadow quality: Voxel, ShadowMap, Future
Render distance: [slider]
Depth of field: on/off
Bloom quality: high/low
Blur quality: high/low
PBR: on/off
Refraction (terrain water and glass): on/off
That way players can prioritize certain things. Right now, to see far away, you have to turn up your graphics settings. But along with that comes many other things. A lot of computers can’t handle all of those effects combined, but can handle turning up the render distance. This would solve that.
A lot of these can easily be accomplished by developers, and I don’t think it’s Roblox’s place to give players these options. Things like this should be handled by the developer because they’re not all completely applicable to all games. What if developers don’t want bloom or depth of field in their game for stylistic reasons?
In my game, I have settings for depth of field, shadow quality (which toggles the Shadow property of lights because I’m using Future lighting), render distance for the lod system, turning shadows completely off, enabling particles, and some other things. It’s not that hard to implement these settings and other developers could easily go more in-depth with it if they want to. More advanced settings that control things that developers implement, like post-processing effects, should be up to the developers.
I didn’t mean turning on/off those effects for all games. I meant only if they exist in those games. Right now, to disable depth of field, future/shadowmap lighting, etc. you have to turn your graphics settings down. But along with that comes limited render distance, bloom quality, etc. My idea was that you could independently control different parts of the rendering instead of just one setting for everything.
Having more settings just means that players can prioritize certain parts of rendering (e.g. higher render distance but lower effect quality and Voxel lighting, or lower render distance but higher effects quality and Future lighting).
For example, if no DepthOfField instance exists in game, the setting will have no effect. But it one does, players can turn it off (which can already be done by turning graphics quality down, except that that turns everything else down along with it)
