Highlight should render on Transparent BasePart

I don’t understand why this isn’t documented behaviour, I was scratching my head and wasted so much time trying to fix this

Whenever a Part.Transparency is more than 0 Highlight will not render, I think there should be a property that allows Highlight to render on it’s Adornee regardless of the Transparency

I have a model with all parts being semi-transparent and I would like to use Highlight on it and currently can not

34 Likes

I agree with this, but the Highlight feature itself is totally bugged. I totally don’t know why are people using it. Roblox hasn’t even said a thing about it being released and the documentation for it in the API Reference is empty.

Is it ok to use the Highlight instance? - Help and Feedback / Building Support - DevForum | Roblox


Anyways, I wanted to make my building system use the Highlight object but since the building gets a bit transparent it just doesn’t work and this is a feature I really need.

Glass Material is also really bugged with Water Terrain and Highlight.

5 Likes

Bump, any update on this Roblox?

2 Likes

Ran into this today, myself. I am making a building system, and I want to use a Highlight to “preview” placement of a block, and I want the preview to look transparent. However, I cannot, because then the Highlight becomes invisible when I set the preview block to be at all transparent.

3 Likes

Hi all, this should be fixed now.

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what if i dont want it to do that?

9 Likes

We also experience undesired highlight behavior, there should be a setting to toggle between displaying opaque objects and non. As of right now its displaying objects it shouldn’t be

7 Likes

Hi,

This change has abruptly ruined the aesthetic of our games because we use hitboxes that we don’t want visible/known to players to be seen, and now which have the highlight attached. Similar to the above posts mentioning this.

This change is abrupt and I’d like to ask you to revert this change until a further solution has been made.

6 Likes

This change shouldn’t have been made! Backwards-compatability has always been the life-blood of Roblox yet this quick-change has outright disregarded the fact that many games may break visually over the fix. Can this be reverted ASAP!

3 Likes

This change is conflicting with mechanics in my game, altering the expected behavior of Highlighted objects. If a part is transparent, I don’t want it to be seen.

I’m baffled this change was made without consulting developers and without a transition period. Please revert this so our experiences don’t display unintended visuals to players.

4 Likes

This change has pretty much broke many games’ visuals. Like the replies above, there should’ve been a way to manually configure if you want a certain part to be included with a highlight, like a CanHighlight property, rather than highlighting everything including transparent parts.


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Thanks all for the quick feedback, and apologies for the breaking changes. I have reverted the fix which was meant to fix the OP case/bug where the highlight is not rendered once a part has a non-zero transparency. I’ll review these test cases more and see if we can find a better solution. If you have good test cases which can solve the OP issue and preserve current behavior, please send my way. Thanks!

10 Likes

I know how most games use highlights and unfortunately, no matter what you make the default behaviour, you’ll make someone unhappy, the only way I can personally see this issue being truly resolved would be via adding a property that controls the maximum transparency an object can have and still be be highlighted, this could be an Enum type (such as “OpaqueOnly”, “TranslucentAndOpaque” - this one is also something people want, and “All”) or quite literally a number that could be adjusted to the developer’s needs on a max transparency - although I’m unsure how you internally calculate parts to highlight so that latter may be possibly less acheiveable.

6 Likes

I personally think having highlights be shown on transparent parts would be the most intuitive solution, as this is the behavior of a ‘SelectionBox’.

Games that have the issues mentioned above can adjust their models so the transparent parts are outside. Not fun for the devs, but shouldn’t be too bad in most cases.

There should be a transition period though.

2 Likes

Roblox shouldn’t ever make a change like this, due to how highlights work there is no way to exclude any item from highlight rendering other than removing it from the model which could break model placement systems, etc. Breaking old games (which by the way, nearly every popular Roblox game broke when this was enabled) is unacceptable.

This, however, was always the case for the SelectionBox instance, nobody ever had to change their SelectionBox because all a sudden it was including transparent parts. It always included transparent parts!

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What about a Threshold property? It would be a number constrainted between 0 and 1. If the part’s apparent transparency is more than the threshold, the highlight does not render on it. Examples:

Threshold Part Transparency Visible
0 0 Yes
0 0.1 No
0.5 0.1 Yes
0.5 0.5 Yes
0.5 0.75 No
1 1 Yes

This would be more flexible than an Enum in my opinion.

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I mentioned this in my reply too, it would be much more convenient yet it’s practicality depends on how highlights currently function/

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this is still a problem and its annoying to see it got added and removed because of faulty release, please enable back highlighting on transparent parts with adding a new property to highlight to render transparent parts

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Bumped into this issue again, like a previous commenter, I think Highlight object should have a transparency threshold, where parts below a certain transparency can be rendered.

Parts should also be able to be whitelisted or blacklisted, possibly by a script. Meaning no matter the transparency, certain parts will always be highlighted and certain other parts will never be highlighted.

2 Likes

Can we also make it so highlights are rendered when inside viewport frames?? This would be a benefit for my current project.

2 Likes