Increase Highlight Limit

Sorry for the confusing response. I wrote this message quickly. I was trying to state that the limit did not make sense.

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I wholeheartedly support this because I’ve stopped developing a game that heavily uses X-rays, using highlights as vision, and, because I can only obtain 31 highlights in the game, I stopped working on it.

Maybe I’ll pick it back up when they come up with a higher figure for the highlight limit.

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Would love to see easing with distance. I find myself using highlights quite often in my game, sometimes it becomes an essential part of an art-style. I would like these limits to be removed as well, since sometimes for small periods of time these limits could be met. Abruptly hiding extra highlights is terrible!! :persevere:

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I would also love to see highlights support added onto mobile, as highlights do now show on mobile devices.

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Highlights are supported on mobile however do not render their outline for performance reasons iirc.

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I think this post sums it up pretty well as to why this limitation exists:

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Even then this is a poor philosophy. Why don’t they leave performance up to the developers of their games? Despite things like this it is very easy to make your game lag out. The limit still makes no sense

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I support this idea, a limit to 31 is tremendously low.
We need a higher limit, like 100…

Alternatively ROBLOX could hide highlights that are above the limit that are further away like particles.

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It’s because the game has shared usage of the server as other games do. There does need to be limits on this sort of thing unfortunately, unless roblox gets better servers.

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Roblox servers don’t have a rendering pipeline so this shouldn’t be an issue, if anything this is a limitation imposed for clients rather than anything server related.

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You know you can overcome the Highlight limit right? Like grouping, grouping a bunch of baseparts and adding a highlight to the model only counts as one but covers the entire model.

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As seen here, 32 highlights is enough, you just need to use them the right way. You can also add 1 highlight to multiple models as long as they’re under the same model.


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This doesn’t work if you need more than 31 different colours, for example, damage indicators that need to fade in and out independently. This also doesn’t work if you want an outline but have the objects visible next to each other in the same frame because the outline will instead wrap around the entire group rather than each model.

On top of that, managing how highlights are grouped is a struggle in itself; you have to sacrifice a usable Explorer tree for the highlights to even work.

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Wait, the limit is 31? I thought it was 50 lol. That’s even worse.
Anyway I agree, I found myself avoiding highlight instances altogether at times bc I knew the limit would just be hard to manage.

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Bump. Need this limit increased asap! Why not increase it to 100, or maybe 500?

I don’t like Roblox’s philosophy of “it’s for performance reasons”. Performance should be left up to the developer of the game, not the game engine itself. Also, there are plenty of things making games laggy otherwise.

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100 highlights would destroy low end devices, so it really is “for performance reasons” but a solution could be lowering the resolution of the outlines based on the hardware

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That should be left up to the developer instead of the game engine. Why does Roblox think they need to determine that for us? A game that doesn’t perform well will lose players, causing the developers to update it or suffer the losses of revenue. Why is Roblox trying to be in charge of a game’s performance? “For performance reasons” is not a valid excuse, as performance should be dictated by the game developer and not the game engine itself. That’s like telling Unreal engine to remove all realistic lighting features because a couple of mobile devices can’t run them properly. Completely backwards logic.

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32 parts in a single model highlighted: only one instance used.

32 highlight instances for 32 parts: same effect but now we hit a limit.

This limit is arbitrary and does nothing but get in the way.

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I find it weird how people complain when Roblox tries to optimise your games for you but you also complain when they don’t, I don’t know if you’ve heard of pick a lane but if you need more than 30 highlights you’re doing something wrong.

There are other ways to do this:
ViewportFrames (If you don’t want occlusion)
BaseParts (Just resize them to be slightly larger than the limb)
SelectionBoxes (Works with outlines so…)

OR

Use Highlights but in moderation.

Just because there may be performance implications of adding the feature right now, that doesn’t mean that a solution for that won’t be found in the future which may make it way more feasible to implement. Also, if the reason for not adding this feature is solely performance reasons (which from what I can tell, that isn’t solely the case), I’d rather be able to optionally take that performance hit if I find that I need more highlights.

Unfortunately, there are some drawbacks with these alternatives;

ViewportFrames: As you mentioned, occlusion is not supported with this. Outlines are also not supported by this solution.
BaseParts: Draw order of transparent parts is not guarenteed on Roblox so this isn’t an ideal solution as if the player has any translucent accessories they will fight to be visible on top of the highlight effect. On top of this, there will unfortunately be visible seams where two parts meet which (in some cases) could also fight to be displayed on top of each other.
SelectionBoxes: This unfortunately doesn’t work for dynamic shaped objects which are not basic cubes.

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