The voxels used for lighting are 4x4x4. This isn’t easily fixed unless Roblox were to change the size of the voxel grid to something lower.
10 Likes
To add on to the poor range, lights do not follow the inverse square law. if it were to be added lights would become a whole lot more realistic, sounds have that property so why cant lights? It is honestly unbelievable that the devs really care that little that they let problems like this just sit for years, its a joke.
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yeah i also hate the way light falloff is implemented, this is due to old lighting having no falloff too so…
And yeah I’d still like to have custom light falloff if Roblox ever notices this posts and removes light range.
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I know right?
You’d think Roblox, with it’s “Powering Imagination” slogan would see this as a common sense change, but oh no, of course not.
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“Powering Imagination”" is just ironic for lighting, since currently for lights, it’s “Powering Limitations”. And I have no idea how is this ignored by staff.
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Here is what I mean by this
Lights should more closely resemble the light on the left. Currently, we are stuck with the one on the right
(for anyone who is curious, the light on the left is constructed of 7 point lights at varying ranges and brightness.)
43 Likes
You need high design imagination if you want to pull off cool lighting (such as @dallasparade did) using beams and Attachments, but hell, the cap limit is useless. Please remove it! It’s our decision if we want the performance to be bad or good. With enough time, I can make a user’s device explode.
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Hey Roblox! When will anyone pay attention to this?
I opened a similar topic today: Increase the maximum range (distance) of a light
But I wouldn’t want to spend time creating an ugly workaround if it could easily be fixed by you guys!
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It’s probably some version of the XBOX/UWP app that they attempted to support with this limit.
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But ruin the experience of Developers and players alike by capping it at a ridiculously low amount. Great compromise, really. 
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I think these are valid enough examples why we need lighting range to be increased. Not only having a lot of light sources just to illuminate most of the area is annoying, but it wastes a lot of performance because lots of light sources = lag.
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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
29 Likes
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.
2 Likes
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