besides the small range of lights, does anyone notice the ugly ring that comes with point lights and spotlights? Near end of light sources you can see an ugly and rough outline and it’s kinda noticable
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Yeah that’s because the attenuation doesn’t exist aswell. We’re in ancient times still.
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This is one of the things that annoys me the most, I have to use multiple lights just to emulate (not very well) what it looks like.
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Roblox, come on! This is a good feature! If it worked fine in FIB then it should work fine in game!
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from my POV, this long-standing limitation that’s definetely overdue for change becomes most apparent in games where you move at high speeds, such as driving games.
here’s a video of me in ultimate driving with the headlights on, which i think have 60 studs of range when it should be, like, 5 times that number:
pay attention to the bridge at just 0:18 and the sign at 0:48
@Eniiqz mentioned this limitation earlier, and i hope this footage helps visualize how short 60 studs is at high speeds
i could also go over other problems shown in the video such as the limited render distance for lights and the smooth terrain grass glitching out at high speeds but ig this is not the right topic for those
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With the Vulkan engine/Future Lighting finally coming to Android, there is no reason to not up the limit to at least 2048.
Each year phones become more and more powerful, mobile is no longer an excuse. In this thread we have demonstrated that the FIB tests worked, using Cheat Engine to up the limit doesn’t impact performance, and 64bit devices being the new standard for Roblox players.
There is genuinely no reason for this limit to exist as soon as Future Lighting for Android is added.
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Yeah, no genuine reason really. Poor shadows resolution? I’ll take it. I just want to illuminate everything without taking shadows into account.
I maxed out cubesize for shadows in Blender EEVEE and here is comparison between few distances from cube to point light
20m
100m
300m
Roblox should honestly accept the fact shadows lose resolution with greater distances, it’s a completely normal thing with real-time lighting, and we have shadow softening anyway.
And I don’t know what are they planning to increase the range. What, increase cube size of shadow maps the futher the light illuminates? Could work, but we know how unoptimized shadows are, especially on future lighting.
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Seriously, they can literslly just lower the shadow resolution the further away from the source it is
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Lights often get stuck in place and have choppy movements on cars from other clients; instead of following the car, it just jitters along far out place too. For a thread that’s been going on for not far from 6 years now, the lack of progress is disappointing but not even surprising at this point given roblox’ track record.
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Shadow Resolution can be solved by increasing shadow blur. The sun and other light sources make shadows blurry as they get further from the object that blocks light.
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A massive chunk of the Roblox playerbase is mobile users. Performance enhancement and UX is a top priority for the engineers in this regard, as simply disregarding their comfort would be an atrocious business move to make.
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This shouldn’t mean our games all need mobile support if i’m making a game i should be allowed advanced graphics because i can just turn off the ability for mobile players to join.
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The “bad for mobile” argument has long been used to justify roblox’s lack of support for commonly found engine features, like large ranges, ray tracing, etc.
I do understand that if mobile is where 50% of your players are, then it should be considered when taking decisions, the problem is, by focusing only on mobile users, you end up limiting the other 50%.
Yes, mobile users wouldn’t be able to benefit as much as pc users from the latest common features (ray tracing, etc.), but that doesn’t mean that the pc playerbase shouldn’t.
Regarding relatively small performance impacts brought by incrasing light ranges (from 60 to, idk, 100), yes, increasing it sounds like games are just gonna run worse than before, but that’s on the dev’s capability of optimising his own work.
Not to mention, roblox themselves allows creators to choose which platforms they support. So say for example i want to make a realistic game, and i dont believe i’d be able to optimise it for mobile users, i can literally just not support mobile completely until i optimise the game
When you limit everyone, what you end up doing is holding back the talented developers who could create amazing things along with the ones that wouldnt. People who have been developing for years (myself included), who knows how to optimise things pretty well, get limited by the idea of a portion of people not being able to optimise things.
In my opinion, the “mobile users wouldnt be able to…” card has long been used to justify roblox’s carelessness for their developers, which are the ones who made them who they are in the first place.
It bugs me how many devs, (who should be the ones who seek for improvements, new features, more creative freedom, etc.) Don’t realise we should be aiming for more, and not for less.
And, before anyone brings up the argument “roblox cant afford financially this or that”. Lets think of that for a moment. Roblox is a billion dollar company (around 40b), they can afford to improve actually useful things, but they wont, why?, i believe they are too busy spending money suing creators, or updating ugc related stuff.
Im not saying roblox shouldnt spend money in other categories of development, what im saying is that they are wasting too much resources on things that aren’t as impactful as, for example, light ranges.
To be honest, i dont play games for flexing my avatar or engage in big events, i just play games for the game’s “fun-ess”, i havent really seen any games whose objective is to flex ur newest limited clothes or smth. So what’s the point of alocating (for example) 10% of all resources to that category when you could use those 5% in somewhere more impactful.
Well, just my thoughts, take it as a talk, not as as agressive argument please.
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But the fact is that they are adding Future Lighting to mobile. Once this is added, there is no reason for this limit to exist
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Instead of limiting developers control of lights in their game for the sake of performance, wouldn’t it be more effective to let developers work around potential performance issues related to the range of lights?
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(potential photosensitive epilepsy warning bc i crash a lot in first-person view)
(also yet another bump i know)
It is IMPOSSIBLE to have dark nights and using only single spotlight to illuminate everything infront of you. You are GURANTEED to crash at high speeds if you can’t see anything and there is a sudden turn ahead.
Someone’s making a more indepth storm-chasing game and they’re suffering from exactly that issue. The only way around it is to simulate the extended lights using more spot lights and things like like, or make nights brighter.
EDIT: Even if you extend lights, it might just potentially not work because the lighting while driving fast is falling behind frequently (doesnt update as fast). You can see what I had to make to extend the light range of this.
… but i still hit a roadblock with lights not updating fast enough and i was still frequently crashing.
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Oh my god that second image looks so bad.
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I believe it is an intentional optimization that, on the lowest graphics levels, the number of voxels that can be updated per frame is severely limited, though they will be higher on the higher graphics levels, and with Future there won’t be any of this on graphics level 4 or higher.
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Would be nice to have a priority system so you can choose lights that need to update faster, but that’s for a separate feature request
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just discovered this video about a hack week project from 2015.
2015.
(give this entire video a watch btw, really interesting stuff!)
what’s crazy to me is that it’s just a 1x1x1 stud grid of voxels, no pixelated shadow maps, or performance draining future lights, just voxels.
this isn’t exactly related to the light range of lights, but my point is to show what is and has been possible this entire time, if the lighting system were to be given more attention.
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