This causes a lot of issues with both performance (i.e when utilizing Humanoids in models to get this feature to work) and general usability where utilizing highlights with transparency can come in handy across various different use-cases.
A key example of where this bug causes a major issue is in the experience On Tap where they utilize highlights across various interactable objects within game that forces them to need to utilize the Humanoid object to ensure that highlights are working correctly, causing significant performance drops across users.
Microprofiler, equipping items using highlights + humanoids, you can notice significant spikes.
Microprofiler, without me equipping items using highlights + humanoids, still not as good of performance, however you can notice the difference in spikes.
This is actually intentional from what I know. Upon release, Highlights did not work with transparent objects, likely because they are rendered in a different part of the pipeline. When this was fixed several months later, it broke a bunch of games, mostly because they used invisible triggers in the same model that had the highlight applied to it, causing pretty bad visual problems, and so the change was rolled back.
Here is the thread that I got this information from:
You should support this Feature Request because it’s not technically a bug.
I don’t think this is intentional, as mentioned there is a work around (adding a humanoid) that allows for it to work without any visual problems or issues other than cluster updates from humanoids.
As the linked staff reply states, the fix was intentionally reverted because it caused games to break. Ergo, Highlights are currently, intentionally, programmed to not work on transparent objects, because if someone at Roblox flipped the switch to make them work, it would cause a ton more problems for games that use Highlights.
There has to be a way to work for both, would love to use highlights for my button finder in my tycoon, but my buttons are “invisible”, so cant use highlights.
Im confused by your response, sure maybe this fix was reverted however Highlights can work with transparent objects in live games with a workaround with no visual issues.
I mean therefore it should be possible to fix, I’m no engineer though.
EDIT: Never mind is see how the threshold of what is transparent to be highlighted is the issue.
