Bumping this myself too. Its one of the things I desire MOST in Roblox Studio and by far and I see absolutely no reason to keep gatekeeping it from the playerbase. Or in this case, the devbase?
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bump… i remember like a year ago to get around this issue i scaled my entire game down to half size and while it did make the light range higher it still looked awful anyways
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Bump. it’s been 7+ years and Roblox still hasn’t done anything.
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here to bump this topic some more, Its very frustrating to light up an open world game I’m working on and every game I make I have to make a custom lighting chunk rendering system because when you have too many lights the roblox rendering system makes some lights start glitching out, its more processing i have to place on the client which takes a hit in my games performance.
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For everyone who doesn’t know yet roblox is working on this with the new unified lighting system.
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honestly, even if they didn’t remove/extend the cap for light range, adding a gradient that starts from the center for lights would be LIFE CHANGING.
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coming back to it yet again.
Coming from Creator Roadmap 2025: Spring Update:
Looks like this is the light range we’ll be receiveing.
Not that satisfying compared to 240 limit, yet it is still an improvement compared to restrictive 60 limit
Hopefully it’s not an arbitrary limitation when 150, 180 or 240 would work performant (mind you, right now voxel lighting engine struggles to render lighting over 60 range)
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Well in fairness, there IS somewhat of a non arbitrary reason as to why they decided to limit lights to 60 studs only. The light and shadow rendering tends to break and shift depending on how large the actual light is.
and this is what 900 looks like:
As you can see, theres a couple visual issues appearing though these are only noticeable if you REALLY push these numbers to extreme values.
At 2400 the shadows become quite soft:
Keep going higher and eventually they will disappear. Though not gonna lie, i would like to have this soft shadow behavior in games.
Oh also another technically not arbitrary reason is the fact that lights already have a low render distance. Here’s what a 1000 stud light looks like:
Now im not posting all of this to defend roblox as to why they should not increase the light range value to infinity. These arbitrary reasons they have can entirely be mitigated with a couple patches/fixes to lights and with the simply ability of letting us select a light render distance on a per-light basis rather than have the entire game set some magical low light render distance.
Can’t agree that its an improvement. Its something i guess but not an improvement. Here’s what that difference looks like. They should at minimum increase it to 240/256 but preferably infinite.
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Yeah I’m aware of such issues, but then again, this happens in any other game engine due to low shadowmap resolution (high resolution would get costly fast)
But considering roblox will continue to use their hybrid system, i still believe voxel grid is the bottleneck.
I wonder how will roblox handle this…
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Here’s a explanation for you, the reason the lights in the distance look so “garbled” up, is because the distant lights are NOT per-pixel lighting. Roblox uses a hybrid lighting model where at a certain distance (even on max graphics) the lighting shader transitions from Future to Voxel, this is also the reason WHY the lighting range cant be easily extended. During the FIB beta phases, future lighting used a exclusive Per-Pixel lighting, there was no sort of “hybrid” approach here, the pixel lighting has no real performance problem rendering at basically infinite distances. Voxels however do, but not in the sense of being performance intensive for the GPU, but rather that if a single light is affecting lets say thousands of voxels because it has a range of 1000, the engine has to keep track of WAY more voxels than it would with a fixed light range, this in hand results in a MASSIVE memory usage for a single light instance.
So in short, the problems aren’t even really rendering related, rather its just a memory problem because of how weird Roblox decided to make both lighting technologies run alongside each other instead of it exclusively choosing one.
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Great point. I have also heard of similar memory concerns regarding voxel when it came to increasing the voxel lighting resolution. Though as ive also said, the limitation is technically not arbitrary. Roblox dug themselves into this problem (along with MANYYY other issues) and are hell bent on not changing anything. The issue i was trying to point out with that 1000 stud light range example is that its even less likely for them to do any meaningful light range increases considering how low/poor the current light render distances already are. Them increasing the light render distances is another story entirely.
Also the unified lighting tech further reduced light render distances! Woohoo!
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