Huge dark shadows - lighting completely broken

Today I opened up my project in studio only to find it covered in darkness:

I opened the project last night and the lighting was perfectly fine. I didn’t accidentally change any lighting settings and save, as the last save was on December 30th.

Here’s what the lighting looked like up until now:

Here’s the lighting settings for the place:
image

I’ve checked for large parts blocking the sun, changed the settings, and I’ve opened another place to compare the lighting settings (which are the same).
This has happened overnight without having changed any of the lighting and I’m fairly confused as to why. Someone please help.

22 Likes

Vouch on this one. Our game suddenly became dark today with users experiencing some lag in those darker areas. I went to the unofficial Devforum Discord and found some other users with similar issues. One recorded this video of it showing meshes having some sort of negative light. I believe this is more of an engine bug as it occurs in live games.

10 Likes

Something must’ve changed internally regarding Lighting.Ambient. Increasing it makes it a bit better.

2 Likes

Can also confirm something is going on. My game is in complete chaos right now. Almost the entire map is pitch black. Players are complaining and there’s nothing I can really do.

1 Like

Same here my game is completely destroyed until this is fixed

I think its related to mesh scaling:
https://gyazo.com/1547275cb6b3f4dd4243656efb06e1f1

7 Likes

Currently happened to me, I was just about to make a post before I saw this.

3 Likes

I’m also experiencing this with the shadowmap lighting setting. It totally was fine yesterday (and even this morning, I’m pretty sure), but on top of the game’s lighting being darker overall, on low graphics the entire map is now plunged into darkness, seems like it just turns the shadows cast by the large mesh parts into massive squares of darkness. It’s still behaving as it was previously on iOS.

pc_graphics10
PC Graphics 10


PC Graphics 1


iOS Graphics 10

iOs Graphics 1

2 Likes

Our game, Witching Hour, is affected by this change. It is also causing frame rate drops and as I can gather, more games are affected.

3 Likes

Can also confirm this issue in my game Oretary.
https://www.roblox.com/games/2312559973/Oretary-Alpha

This is causing my game to drop drastically from 30 players to 3 due to the framerate problems.
I’ve spent over 5,000 ROBUX on ads also, this is unacceptable.

2 Likes

Thanks for letting us know. Our engineers are looking into the issue. We’ll update this thread with further developments.

42 Likes

image

This also seems to increase shadow sizes in voxel/compatibility games.

2 Likes

Yeah, this is happening in Minery too.
It was fine about 2 hours ago.

It seems like the issue is only with SpotLights and not with PointLights or SurfaceLights.

2 Likes

A fix for this is to disable all meshes ability to cast shadows, run this in command bar.

for i,v in pairs(workspace:GetDescendants()) do 
	if  v:IsA("MeshPart") and v.CastShadow then 
		v.CastShadow = false
	 end 
end 

you will manually need to re enable all meshes you want to be on

3 Likes

Can confirm this is happening to me too. Like huge shadows in random places, plus causing a bit of framerate drop.

1 Like

It was happening for me as well.

1 Like

Not sure if this is due to the recent update or not, but for some reason my game suddenly started having crazy shadows which make the entire map look black. I haven’t touched the Lighting and it started happening on multiple of my places about an hour ago.

As you can see, when I start deleting parts of the map, the huge shadows disappear. I have no idea whats going on.
https://gyazo.com/ec0bddf1abd39094fc2878ddfa9845bf

4 Likes

I have the same issue, we were 2 hours into a game and it just randomly went pitch black.

1 Like

This issue is affecting my own game as well. It also causes extreme frame drops (for instance, one part of my map brings my cpu latency to over 600ms, and my gpu to well over 100ms.)

It can be temporarily fixed by setting Lighting.GlobalShadows to false.

3 Likes

Go to lighting: ShadowSoftness, and then change it to 1, go to ExposureCompensation and change it to -1.04, make sure fog is far away. if this doesn’t helps then I don’t know.

1 Like

From what I’ve noticed, is it’s mostly meshes.

1 Like