Looks amazing, this has improved my map a lot.
For me, the environment maps do update kinda quick (about 2-5 seconds), however I wish it updated slightly faster. (Tip: just shift your camera everywhere until the env map shifts. I guess the env maps only transition on camera movements.)
Also would like to have “adaptive envmap resolution”. Right now the environment maps look like garbage, even when barely going close to them. Would be cool to see the resolution update to lower-res from further distances, and higher-res up close, sort of like a level-of-detail system.
Aside from the few things that are irritating, this has greatly improved the quality of my maps.
as they said, this Dynamic ENV map thing thing is still in beta, so not everything here is perfect, nor is it’s final product. Expect changes for the better.
Yeah hey Roblox, a way to disable this would be appreciated. It seems a lot of people aren’t feeling it, and unless you do real-time reflections(which for understandable reasons can’t happen, at least not for now) it seems it wont be good enough for a lot of people either. This should 100% be something we can disable should we see fit because I don’t want it either. I have a hallway of different kinds of metals (sci-fi hallway) that can be bright or dark(intended) depending where i walk and how long i’m there and where I look.
It is also very jarring watching the light change in dark rooms. I’ll send an example of an unfinished unlit room and how much you can literally watch it change as you walk in
Keep in mind I didn’t change anything between any of these pictures, this is all changing in front of me as I walk around. So in my use case, I would rather have the option to just disable this as it is not going to be a helpful feature to me. I do like the update, I think it needs work, and I think it should be optional along with almost every visual update you guys do, I don’t believe you should be forcing any sort of visual settings on the players or the developers causing weird effects that a simple toggle could fix.
Continuation of these posts: (you know this update is bad when a person has to do 3 rant posts about it.)
and
With that out of the way, the future of this update is looking very bad.
Reflections = Global Illumination apparently. smh
Global Illumination is great and can really improve graphical fidelity on many games, but EnvMaps are an awful way to do it. (I’m done sugar coating my replies because of how many flaws I’ve seen.) These are relative to the orientation of your camera (not position) and can cause distortion and discoloring when you walk from room to room. Global Illumination and reflections are similar, but still have differences, and trying to use reflections as pseudo GI is a horrible idea. The system used to decide to create a new EnvMap just makes it look even worse.
Example:
This could be a bit better if Roblox allowed for parallax correction on these EnvMaps, but it still would look a bit jarring.
This is a very, very, bad idea.
“automatic placement.” I’m worried because since Roblox prioritizes performance over quality, this could mean that we’re going to only have probes with similar features to what we have now (no parallax correction, slow updating time, poor quality, etc) that affects every single object. This also could mean that it’s still applied on every surface, which I’ve explained in detail why this is will make indoors look absolutely horrendous in my 2 previous replies.
Why do we need to turn up EnvironmentDiffuse/SpecularScale?
Why can we have some sort of reflective property that doesn’t need the Environmental Specular and Diffuse scale cranked all the way up? There is literally no reason for this to be tied to either scale, and it’s especially annoying when thin walls.
Default skybox with EnvironmentalDiffuse/SpecularScale set to 1, with 1 stud thick walls. Awful.
We only get 1 EnvMap
If you’re only going to give us 1 EnvMap, we might as well use the skybox for reflections in interior showcases seeing as we have much more control over them than we do with this update. Literally, CloneTrooper1019’s skybox reflections are better than this update because they are subtle and update based on triggers and not some system that has trouble finding where the center of a room is.
Skybox color and reflections affect Indoor EnvMaps
This further emphasizes the fact that this does not need reflections to be tied to EnvironmentalDiffuse/SpecularScale. Notice how the object is well underground and away from the ceiling.
Pic from @amer_thel
Stop keeping customization and flexibility out of our reach
Giving us an cool update with tons of potential to enhance the graphics, experience, and immersion of games but only giving us the option to enable it, is like taking a kid to a theme park and not letting him go on any rides. I said it before to give more control to developers and ease up on restrictions. If you’re so worried about performance, just create a system that will disable probes after a certain amount of probes are visible and if it’s far enough away. If you want to go further, just use CubeMaps of nearby reflective surfaces.
There’s so many things that is bad about this update that I think I can safely say I hate it. I don’t hate the addition of reflections to Roblox, but I despise the restrictions, the unnecessary things we need to enable to actually have them, the quality, the system used to judge reflections, the lack of control, and the reason why it’s being added: to fake global illumination. Reflections are relative, if you move from one spot to another, reflections move and warp accordingly. Global Illumination on the other hand is mostly static, if not completely static. For a multi-billion company who had the resources to implement real-time reflections 2 years ago, and this is what they had to show for it now? I’ve gotta say, I’m pretty disappointed.
EDIT: I am sorry to any Roblox Staff I have offended who are working on this current update or any additions/features/etc., that I have mentioned in my replies. I originally thought that Roblox had been working on this for quite some time, but it never occurred to me that this update might have been because Roblox needed to implement more features because it just opened to investors. I am sorry for being insensitive and ignorant to the fact that these updates take time, resources, and patience. I also apologize for expecting so much of a Phase 1 Beta and from a few developers. It never occurred to me that there could be a small team working on this within very strict parameters of the Roblox Engine. Big thanks to CloneTrooper1019 for providing insight and and letting me know that what I did was very over the top and unnecessary. I may not be pleased with the current state of this update, but that doesn’t mean I should be a complete pessimist and lash out to anyone working on this. Huge respect to the staff members working on IndoorEnvMaps and to CloneTrooper1019.
You seem kind of upset… are you okay? Who hurt you?
I agree with the sentiment that we should have more manual control over this feature rather than having Roblox automate it. Would be nice if we could provide manual hints for where we would like the cubemap to be centered at, in case room detection isn’t adequate enough.
But regarding the quality of the effect, do understand this is a small quality of life enhancement in the grand scheme of things, being worked on by… at most a couple rendering engineers, within the confines of the current rendering pipeline, and it’s likely in it’s early stages. It is not set in stone final that it will forever look like this.
The hysterical tone you’re using here makes me think you believe they poured several months of time and ALL of their available engineering resources into the problem. Throwing around the value of the company has been, and always will be counter-productive. It’s a balance of time, demand, resources, and the scalability of the engine. You have to be patient with these things.
Just because they had a hackweek demo of reflection probes does not mean it was a feature that they could ship. Future is bright was in the works for years after we saw the initial hackweek demo for it, and the prototype builds that were released showed how experimental and quirky the settings were at that point.
Just learn to have some respect, you aren’t the one on the backend working on these shaders and you can’t attest to the complexity of what they’re doing.
I actually have to agree with you here. Roblox’s Envmaps aren’t really effective for something like global illumination. What’s worse is that if you move a part in studio and look at it through the Envmap, it just fades out to the position it was placed afterwards. The fading is a bad sign of this. I feel that having more options for these Envmaps similar to the reflection probes in the Unity engine would be better. Unity even has DirectX12 support (unraytraced if you’d like), so it’s a better engine for graphics and all that. Added bonus: You won’t have to deal with any moderators deleting your PBR assets because they are “inappropriate” to the bots and you don’t have to follow these rules on the Unity engine. I feel Unity is giving more freedom than Roblox is at this point. Sure, Roblox is adding these things now and is getting to be showcased properly half of the time if we’re not talking about front page games like “Adopt Me!” or “Brookhaven RP”, but they aren’t adding customization nor are they adding good default options for them. Unity even allows you to make things only cast the shadow without rendering the actual thing itself. This is very useful, especially for first person games, I don’t understand why Roblox hasn’t added this yet.
With this in mind, please consider this feature request. These would be a much more powerful alternative to the old reflectance property.
As an aside, I’ve thought about this for a little while and I do think that most of the comments about this feature being automated are coming from doomthink, perhaps partially with respect to the same automation-first principle applying for other aspects of the platform. Roblox is trying to automate too much which I definitely agree with (this is probably why Humanoids incessantly try to climb absolutely everything and we cannot control it…), but with respect to this feature in particular, automating this is a great timesaver for developers. The reality is that after sufficient polish, the majority of players will simply not notice any hiccups this system generates, and it will very much improve the appearance of games.
That said, there are of course issues with it currently that people have also brought up, e.g. transitions being too slow, reflectors being visible in themselves, ugly low resolution reflections on flat surfaces, etc.
I personally do not like how transitions between probe positions in two different rooms seem to be very slow; in this video you can see a strong green underglow on most metal parts in the second room and it takes a few seconds and some dancing to see it change.
Also, you can see something especially weird here: the tunnel spontaneously gets brighter when you stand in a bright room, which is the opposite effect you’d get in real life e.g. standing in the sun and looking into a cave, and also ruins the atmosphere I’m going for.
I also noticed yesterday that when I was flying around in a new showcase of mine, the Envmaps were constantly changing. There’s almost no reflective surfaces (mostly concrete), yet it’s changing to white, it really shouldn’t do.
smh
