Not to mention the performance on shadowed lights is terrible in general, especially for lower end PC’s / laptops (like the one I’m using right now)
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It actually kind of is. The intense math that engineers what have to do to calculate range and the brightness at higher range is actually stupid hard.
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That’s just the general issue with shadowmaps (don’t use Future in case you are), it has to re-render the scene from the light’s point-of-view every time the scene updates/the light moves. You’ll have this in many other games as well.
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What? They managed to make lights reach 60 studs, why can’t they just increase it? I mean, come on.
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I believe they mean the engineers had to do insane stuff to get it to run at 60 fps with just 60 studs on lower end devices like phones. Making that limit more would make rendering lights exponentially slower as you increase the range and require even more optimization than there already is.
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I believe the argument of “it won’t run well on phones” is largely a conflict of interest between people wanting to profit from (or for) Roblox and people wanting to make highly polished games on Roblox. As a developer for only PC games, why should I care if mobile players can run my game? I can (grumpily) accept such reason for a whole new feature that may require investing into r&d such as projected decals, or, if I’m in a very good mood, letting us use udp instead of tcp, as the engine itself does for physics replication. This issue, and ones like it, show a bigger problem than just a light range, or just lacking projected decals - Roblox is working just happily on adverts in games, and were happy to set up a way for you to send them photos of your id just to use voice chat. It is even more frustrating when there absolutely does not seem to be an engine limitation preventing this for PC - you can hook cheat engine into studio and bring the light range higher than 60, only for it to be clamped back down when you publish. It feels very dishonest and corporate when you are completely radio silent over a clamp on light range for 5 years now, especially when the old fib hack week let you set the range of a light higher than 60 studs with absolutely no issues. I want to give the engineers over at Roblox the benefit of the doubt that some higher ups are stopping them from pushing features or something of that nature but it’s very hard to not get mad when there have been maybe up to 5 instances of Roblox or someone on behalf of Roblox communicating to us about this over 5 entire years. It makes me want to stop using this platform very much when Roblox completely depends on developers making games and assets for it, takes about 70% of their pay and proceeds to not do just about anything a large portion of the developer community persistently asks for features that i have no doubt are simple for the engineers they can afford, asks for REMOVING A NUMBER CLAMP or begs to have manual control over a feature that changes how a game looks that doesn’t involve completely disabling a different unrelated lighting feature, only for the feature to get pushed anyways with 0 manual control over it. Can they not even do the bare minimum of telling us “No, removing the clamp on light ranges is actually not possible because the entire Roblox backend is structured around this single fact that lights cannot go past 60 studs”? Do the people in charge of choosing features to give to the engineers believe this will be a very hard task? The only things we can do are theorize about why this hasn’t been done for this long or let ourselves be contempt with being completely ignored while propping up this company.
tl;dr
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yeah as the guy above me mentions, in the FIB version it worked perfectly fine, wouldn’t see why it wouldn’t work for normal roblox games.
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indeed, if it worked fine there, then it should work fine in a stable build.
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I believe I have the reason to why they will not bring this feature, Roblox has a render distance on lights. Roblox’s render distance will destroy the look of lights that are long range as they may get cut off sharply and will look unnatural.
Also rendering something outside that range and not others will create some higher problems and we can see this done on shadows where they get cut off at a certain distance to prevent lag, however that distance is way higher than light distance.
1 Like
Most Roblox games that aspire realistic graphics are not designed for mobile gameplay and are often disabled from playing. When Future Lighting was first released there was the problem of lag even on modern phones so they had to use the classical ShadowMap, same can be done for lights to force them on a 60 studs range whilst keeping PC players on unrestricted.
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I’ve been begging for Roblox to remove the light range ever since the “Future” lighting came out. Large scale builds with lights are just embarrasing with how far lights can go.
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I believe developers should be able to use something that may at worst result in a visual footgun, especially when the alternative is not allowing light to reach more than ~16 meters while simultaneously polishing the rendering with pbr and whatnot. Again, it’d be great if Roblox actually bothered to say whether this is something they’re unable or unwilling to add, or whether it’s something they haven’t seen after 5 years of activity on the devforums.
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Then increase the render distance?
They could just increase the render distance for lights specifically, OR BETTER YET:
Allow Developers to control it.
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I’m saying it would be impossible with the current Render Distance for lights and other entities like shadows.
Increasing Render Distance will cause a lot more lag by letting you see unnecessary detail at far ranges. They cannot allow the developers to change it since people already have lag from Streaming Enabled even with short distances.
It’s already possible via cheat engine (in studio, don’t try to attach cheat engine to the client or you’ll probably get banned)
At ~300 studs (~60 meters i think) distance between a pixel (as opposed to light origin) and the camera the light will switch to voxel and start looking funny, but before that, even with shadows on, everything works completely fine. Distance between the camera and origin of the light don’t seem to matter much, though note that the shadows will have less resolution to work with the further away the light is. The only issue is light falloff - I’m pretty sure the lights having no falloff is due to them trying to maintain visual compatibility with voxel, which doesn’t make much sense to me… The entire point of this is to not look like voxel.
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I’m talking about the lights. Not the render distance of parts.
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Bumpity bump again!
This needs updated.
The 60 studs limit is pathetic.
At least make it 120.
At least.
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The limit should honestly be whatever the developer wants, Roblox placing what they think it’s best isn’t good for the community at all. (We can already create lag ourselves, wonder what’s the point of having the limit so short)
Limiting features like the Light’s range it’s something terrible. This also happens with many other features like the Fire’s size. Is just a pain to deal with them and makes the feature nearly unuseful to what we want to achieve.
Increasing the limit cap to something big like 1k studs or something like that will be totally great. I personally have a tree that has a height of 126 studs: (Yet I had to use two blocks with a Surface Light in them to make the tree light up at night)
Time Since Request Has Been Made: 5 Years
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Bump, This is much needed. 60 studs is far too short especially if you have a driving game for example and want to have decent headlights.
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