I am in support of this as well. Between jagged edges, low shadow draw distance, and no global illumination, there is not much else in the way of making games look photorealistic. Except maybe a 50k mesh limit, since someone could easily import 100 separate 10x tris models.
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This was much better when it was in beta. Why did you have to nerf it to oblivion?
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I feel that this is an extremely arbitrary constraint that I could only see a small percentage of investors actually caring about. If adding non-physical instances is a benefit to your developers, maybe even allowing for more “creativity” (which I know roblox is always aiming for), then I don’t see how its rational to hold back for the sole reason: “there is no such thing as a lighting probe in the real world”. I’m fairly certain no one actually cares about this design direction. This isn’t only “inconvenient”, it’s quite illogical and I wish the people at roblox would stop prioritizing gimmicks over developer QoL
What especially frustrates me is the line:
Why are we being forced to miss out on these innovations, when it’s clearly roblox’s job to deliver the best version of this engine they can? If it was a technical limitation, I’d be a lot more content with this decision, but I don’t even think thats the issue here, or else they’d just tell us.
This honestly feels more like an excuse to not add nuance to your engine, cmon roblox, seriously?
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Do you know what else isn’t in the “real world”?
Scripts, Gui, Selection boxes, literally 99% of Roblox???
Internal objects like StringValues?
This is sad and shameful.
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The absolute adamancy to add things that just about every other engine has out there because of realism concerns is why this engine will continue to be severely limited. Most games on roblox aren’t aiming for realism, they’re low poly and pastel colored, loaded with fictional concepts that would never be possible in the real world. How can one be oblivious to the majority of developers?
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I disagree. Roblox is a platform to host many types and genres of games. You may play low poly games but the engine should be capable of many other styles. How does adding features limit the capabilities of roblox?
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I think you might have misread my post. The roblox engine is lacking many features that other engines have. We still don’t have global illumination, custom shaders, lighting range that goes past such an arbitrary limit, occlusion culling, etc.
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I did misread it, my bad. You’re blue by the way.
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The fact that Roblox cares about implementing things in a realistic way is what makes it resilient to future changes, and will allow it to continue being competitive in the market. Investors in Roblox see this vision too.
Roblox never wants to deprecate a feature. They always want every game to run on the latest version of the Roblox engine; as they make the engine better, all games rise with it. This doesn’t always happen in practice, but this is Roblox engine’s greatest strength.
Someday, when enough devices support it, Roblox will support raytracing and lighting will be solved.
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It’s useless, what we need is Screen Space Reflection and (PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD ADD SCREEN SPACE REFRACTION TO PBR 
)
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The fact that Roblox cares about implementing things in a realistic way is what makes it resilient to future changes, and will allow it to continue being competitive in the market. Investors in Roblox see this vision too.
I don’t see how restricting the one thing that could’ve made this feature huge makes the engine more resilient, I feel as if that’s once again, just another excuse
Not a single investor would feel negative toward the addition of custom lighting probes, why would they? We can’t rely on a silly gimmick roblox has placed on us, what we need is good developer tools, features that actually innovate
Roblox never wants to deprecate a feature. They always want every game to run on the latest version of the Roblox engine; as they make the engine better, all games rise with it. This doesn’t always happen in practice, but this is Roblox engine’s greatest strength.
They hesitate to deprecate features because many games already integrate them into their core scripts. There’s unfortunately no motivating, PR positive explanation for this other than the simple reality
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I don’t understand why SSR isn’t yet implemented. Or at least individually control for Specular, Metallic, Roughness value on BasePart than just going into Photoshop and adjust the brightness manually. Thanksful for having color tint adjustment for the DiffuseMap but what about other 4? What about Emission, IOR, actual Alpha Map, custom Ambience Occlusion. This is easily done in Engine like UE4, Unity or even D5 Render.
If Roblox not going to do it, then let Developer import their own Shader and let it be when Player’s loading in. Also more than anything we need Parallax Shader support as current method we’re doing isn’t even what we’d call Parallax Indoor Mapping.
Just to add, The way SSR worked is already optimized more than enough, it only process after render and only render what’s in your screen, unlike Ray Tracing that cost a lot more resources. And confirmed by one of the reply from Roblox’s Staff, it’s not that they can’t or having technical difficulties, they just don’t want to since it’s unrealistic.
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This is 2024 my man, we aren’t using Iphone 4 anymore. Even my GTX 1050 that probably half decade old still capable of render scene in D5, and UE4.
And as a developer, it’s us responsibility to manage our own game, not Roblox’s. If my game has bad performant, the player will roast on me, then I will lose play count then I will need to work on Optimization.
It’s never Roblox’s, yet they should work on making their engine run smooth. But not limit the proclaimed “Powering Imaginations”
Roblox’s only advantage over these game engines is the fact that they’re a platform, let bet they’re individually like Unity or UE4, none going to use their engine when there’s better out there. I wouldn’t neither if not because of the connected platform.
You can see my creations back in 2022, and how better would it looks with all the feature implemented.
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Gald to hear that Roblox isn’t denied the idea of SSR, yet it has been 3 years since the Indoor Cubemap feature, Is there any news on the working of Screen Space Reflection by any time soon?
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“maybe even in the future, maybe!!”
this doesnt sound like accepting the idea at all, more likely just the employee being forced to answer a question and saying a bunch of words that mean nothing because they have no right to speak about the future of roblox
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It’s been 3 years and yet this feature has stayed the exact same since it was added. It’s clunky, has no developer control, and ruins the look of scenes almost as often than it improves them.
Aren’t the envmaps already projected onto cubes?
I will listen to this argument once you tell me where the hell I can find a SelectionBox or a UserGameSettings in the real world.
This seems super overengineered and it would just be better to give devs control of where the probes end up. I suggest a hybrid of the two where we can place our own probes in certain areas and generate them automatically in places where a probe isn’t put in manually.
This is such a promising feature and a massive step in the right direction but with Roblox’s current design philosophy and workforce, this feature looks like it has, and will have missed potential.
Above all else, we don’t care that environment probes don’t exist IRL, we just want them. That is one feature I and many others would LOVE. Please add them.
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The general usage of the say “Features should represent the real world” is a dodge to avoid the question outright, as I heavily doubt the “real world” has the “server” nor the “client”.
Let’s mention the overall usage of PhysicalProperties being able to change the density of objects that doesn’t adhere to their native material, none of this makes any sense outright.
It’s the same case as the SelectionBox that @Scrufflord had mentioned, It. Doesn’t. Exist.
Regardless of all of this, I feel like the overall feature has been abandoned for the worse, same case as the atmosphere clouds feature, no updates, cryptic messages from interns… lack of overall support from any member of the roblox developmental team.
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I thought of a few ways this feature could be improved.
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The envmaps shouldn’t only work indoors, there’s no reason why the sky reflections couldnt be put under the generated envmaps, rather than over, as they are now. Outdoor scenes would look a whole lot better.
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LET DEVELOPERS PLACE THE SPOTS WHERE THEY ARE GENERATED! The overengineered automatic placement of probes, while easier for devs to implement in their game, limits artistic freedom, and often looks very jank. A hybrid system with the ability to specify areas where the probes are manually placed would be the best solution to this, anywhere that isn’t within those areas can use the current system. Plus, if the holdup for outdoor reflections is the automatically placed probes, then outside the areas the dev specifies it could just use the sky reflection as it does now.
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We need the ability to control what resolution the envmaps are generated, be it through the graphics slider, based on how much vram is allocated, heck, even a fastflag would work. As it stands, they are way too low resolution.
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While not required, parallax correction would make the reflections more seamless, and help with immersion.
Hey! I just made a post about this, where I modified the compiled executable of Roblox Studio to generate EnvMaps at 2048x2048!
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Roblox has SSR in the… WATER terrain (Correct me if it’s not SSR), it does reflect very nicely, but I still would love not Screen Space REFLECTION but Screen Space Refraction. Most normal mapped glass will not diffuse the light at all, it really sucks