As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to make good looking shadows.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because the current shadows look too low res.
People who work with realistic environment games have to use hacky ways to achieve good shadows results and an improvement would make things a lot easier.
Higher res shadows are a nobrainer, they look good and there’s no reason to not have these.
We could the shadows unchanged from the current behaviour on graphics lower than 8, but in 2026 it’s kind of embarassing we don’t have good shadows.
Colored shadows are also essesntial, when a part is transparent, the shadow becomes more transparent rather than staying as “Solid” for objects with transparency under 0.5. It should be a colored shadow based on the basepart’s main color3 value.
“UsE ShaDoW SOftNeSs sEt tO 1”… no that won’t work. it can’t even be seen.
ShadowSoftness = 1
Games like GTA 5 (released on PC in 2015) already have high resolution dynamic shadows (non-baked). There is no reason why wouldn’t we have them in 2026.
This would be great to see. There have been numerous times where I wanted my shadows to be sharper and to avoid any blurring/anti-aliasing but could not get them right due to engine limitations. I like how this could mimic Roblox’s old stencil lighting system as well and restore many old games back to their original look and feel.
It’s possible to get higher resolution shadows by just scaling up the size of the Workspace. Not to mention Ambient Occlusion gets a lot better too with the only downside being shadows disappear faster.
There’s also Doom 3 - and Quake 4 - which released all the way back in 2004 and 2005 - respectfully, and they have fully dynamic stencil shadows. Most devices of today should be capable of playing either of these games on High settings. School laptop I used 10 years ago could play Doom 3 on max just fine at 1080p.
I believe problems like these should be solved while improving the shadows. This is simply a basic showcase of the problem that limits a far more complex build with windows.
I get the motivation behind the request, but I think it’s treating a few separate problems like they’re one easy fix. “Improved shadows” here really means higher shadow resolution, better filtering, and colored/translucent shadows, and those are all different features with different costs (and those costs can be EXPENSIVE). Roblox has to make this work across a huge range of devices and user-made games, which is very different from comparing it to something like GTA V.
GTA gets away with those shadows because it’s a tightly controlled AAA game with dedicated shadow settings and way more room to spend performance and VRAM on them (and the same goes for the other game comparisons brought up elsewhere in the thread). Roblox can’t just assume that that same cost works platform-wide. So while I agree current shadows can look rough, “higher res shadows are a no-brainer” is a grossly reductive oversimplification that hand-waves away a lot of important caveats.
Also, it’s worth noting that Roblox already considered these things when they were building the Future is Bright lighting engine, and came to the conclusion that the performance costs were just not worth it. Arseny Kapoulkine (aka zeuxcg), who was instrumental in Future is Bright’s creation, did a detailed writeup about it on Medium a few years back. I highly recommend checking it out if you want to know more about performance cost specifics.
This is amazing, but you need to remember that Roblox needs to run on tons of different devices. A well optimized game could utilize this tech amazingly, but any highly unoptimized games would suffer. Some of the lighting tech you’ve mentioned from other games is highly technical, requiring every single light source to be meticulously configured to look good while maintaining high performance. I assume Roblox will ultimately want to preserve high performance on clients and simplicity in studio in the name of audience reach/accessibility.
Roblox has a graphics slider for this exact reason. Any arguments one could make about performance or resource usage make zero sense when they can very easily tie it in to the thing designed to solve that problem.
Certain things probably can’t be tied to a graphics slider. And I assume that includes many of the processes that happen internally in the engine.
Also, games are very different in how they implement features of the Roblox engine. It would come down to developers adding their own performance options, which you already see in many games on the platform. That ties back to my point that developers must optimize their own games.
Numerous other games have graphics settings for shadow resolution, Roblox’s engineers would have to be genuinely incompetent (which, they’re not) in how they designed their systems if it were not possible and the same would go for the colored shadows too.
I’m sure it’d be possible for some middle ground to be met that allows for low cost higher res shadows hell even implement a system that mipmaps the shadows so the sharper ones are up close whilst the ones further away are softer.
Also agree that yeah, the slider is there. Personally I would like a more customizable graphics option but thats a discussion for another time
