If this was the case, why has Roblox not implemented some sort of prebaking system already? Car headlights, sure, they can drive around, and they would need to make the lighting run in real-time, but for the majority of lighting it can be prebaked, thus saving lots of performance costs while rendering.
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You’re right. You’ll probably be happy to know that Roblox already does do this, too. If a light isn’t moving and the parts are not moving, the lighting gets calculated once and stays “baked” until something changes, which is the best of both worlds. For voxel-based lighting modes this means the voxels get written once and stay written, and for future is bright lights this means their shadowmaps don’t get updated either.
The problem is the more area a light covers, the more baking it has to do when the light moves. Radius cubed, so grows pretty wildly. You can test this yourself by making some absolutely massive surface lights and then move small lights near them, it chugs pretty badly because of how big the updated area has to be…
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So, this is the problem. I guess the only solution at this point is to just scale the whole world down, unless somehow there’s a solution for this.
I mean the light could also be updated in chunks so it’s not updating the entire area at once.
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I thought voxel lighting already did this though.
Hi everyone!
We are aware of the restrictive nature of light ranges. We’re investigating solutions, but as you have already guessed there are some technical challenges surrounding it.
I have no specifics to announce around this today, but it is on our radar!
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So… any more news on this? It’s been 41 days.
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Just because something is investigated or put on radar does not mean it’s actively in development nor is development expected to make a turn around in a month.
Best you can do is be patient. Trying to rush staff on things isn’t going to speed things up and largely only adds to noise.
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Any news…? It’s been 5 years. And the limit is still 60.
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I would still be happy infact if we could sacrifice shadow quality for light range. I just hope this is gonna be addressed eventually, but there is nothing about light range things so far.
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I think the light range is limited for a reason for performance reasons.
I still support the idea of removing the cap though.
But tbh I think what we really need is the ability to bake or pre-calculate lighting (in-studio or in-game) for large or complex environments to increase performance and visual quality.
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in blender you can increase light range as far as you can, and at least from my perspective, that didn’t impact performance much, but it causes jank with shadows when light source is far away. I think this is what roblox engine programmers fear so yeah.
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Blender uses raytracing (in cycles at least) which uses far different render techniques than Roblox.
Not sure about Eevee but I usually avoid it because it’s buggy and doing reflections and diffusion is a hassle, but it’s a completely different render engine as Roblox that handles lighting in different ways.
Roblox afaik just uses regular rasterization and simple screen-space “raytracing” to quickly and cheaply calculate shadows dynamically but also has it’s limitations and certain performance hits.
Also pretty sure transparency still uses forward rendering which performance wise… is pretty slow with lots of lights.
The computational cost is [Amount of visible lights] X [Amount of visible meshes] and quickly sky rockets in computational cost with every mesh/light (if I’m not mistaken).
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Bump. Staff should see this. Improved lighting could make immersive experiences, such as horror, 1000x better.
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Eevee is real-time rendering, and this is what I used to compare shadowmap with low range light and high range lightss, o ofcourse shadows there would cause jank here. Cycles is obviously raytraced, so there is none of that happening.
Staff already saw this, they said it’s on their radar but so far no updates. All we can do is wait until staff provide us with updates.
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I’m pretty sure it won’t come out, it’s literally been 5 years it just proves that it’s possibly the least they care about at the moment
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We need to forward this oh my god I tried making a space game and I literally cant make ANYTHING bright at all… even just 300 could sell the effect…
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It took 5 years to get a staff response. But I wouldn’t expect that response to yield much immediately. We must be patient but at the same time iirc the roadmap page is no longer being updated so we have no idea of knowing if this is still going to be on radar if we don’t stop complaining. Which is the unfortunate reality until they bring that back. But at least we got A response… Realistically we might get an official announcement several months from now. Maybe Q3 2023 but if it’s not announced by then. I don’t know when it’ll be.
Keep in mind all I’m saying is speculation from how Devs tend to approach these things…
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These are some of the reasons that make developers move on to other game engines.
Roblox have been cutting off the support of some old devices, so why not remove the light limit.
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We can do a high range of light using Surface Light, by lengthening the object, I’ll give an example:
But this is absolutely not what we wanted, and also the lighting is transmitted with artifacts (depending on how much to lengthen the object), by the way, this method can optimize the game, instead of using 3 light sources, we can use 1 source by lengthening it, but it does not fit all cases.
I absolutely do not understand what kind of technical problem a company cannot solve at the cost of several billion over 5+ years.
it would seem such a simple request, but which cannot be done for a long time. I hope this year or at least next year it will be implemented
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