I’ll write down some answers to some frequently asked questions I’ve seen so far here!
Q: When will extended light ranges and attenuation be available?
A: These two features will come later this year after the full release of Unified Lighting. Unified Lighting provides us with a solid foundation to continue building additional lighting features. We know how widely requested these two features are, so they are going to be the next thing for us to look at once Unified Lighting is fully released.
Q: I want to be able to use Voxel lighting. Will Unified Lighting prevent me from doing so?
A: No! In fact, all lighting visuals which were previously achievable through the Technology property can be achieved by the new Unified Lighting parameters. The Soft lighting style with non-prioritized lighting should give you results equivalent to what Voxel used to provide. See the reference provided in the original post to see how Unified Lighting maps onto the look of the previous lighting technologies.
Q: Lights seem to cut off or lose shadows at distances I didn’t expect. Will this be changed still?
Yes! We’re still actively tweaking how and when Unified Lighting scales throughout the duration of this Studio Beta. Expect there to be additional tweaks and improvements to this throughout the beta period.
Please make sure to report any bugs you encounter so we can address these as quickly as possible!
One additional update: We’ve noticed some crashes coming from devs using Studio with OpenGL selected as their Graphics Mode in the Studio Renderer settings. We have a fix for this incoming.
On Windows we don’t actively support OpenGL as a fully featured rendering mode in Studio, so please make sure to use the Automatic graphics mode if you want to try the Unified Lighting beta at this time.
Seems like even though Realistic Prioritized is meant to match future, the range for high quality local lighting is lower than that of Future, which is a little disappointing since that was that mode’s whole selling point. There’s also still a big difference in how lighting looks on lower quality levels, even on Unified lighting, so I can only hope the GPU-driven light grid will help alleviate that difference.
Will there ever be support for changing lighting technology live while playing? This appears to already be possible, but is restricted from normal code execution. I ask because it would be nice to be able to tie lighting technology to a specific user’s settings, or to potentially have it change dynamically based on performance (whether that system be automatic by Roblox or coded by developers).
This does not seem to be the case. Whenever I open a place that previously used ShadowMap, the LightingStyle is always set to Realistic, when it should be Soft instead, and I have to manually change it.
I opened Roblox Studio just now to check my lighting and it changed drastically. If I wasn’t a devforum addict I probably wouldn’t understand why things looked so different. I used ShadowMap lighting for the “soft” look. My lighting was changed to Realistic with PrioritizeLightingQuality off. This is what it looked like when I opened studio:
sorry! I only glanced through the page and didn’t see a 3rd one that’s more akin to voxel when using studio. I bring up what I said because I would like them to add a 3rd preset that’s voxel instead of the 2. it just feels very off having 2. but you don’t gotta be rude about it my guy!
I’m not rude, I guess since I’m using the translator and we’re not from the same country it might seem that way. Until now I have never been nor do I intend to be rude to anyone here; In fact, I took the trouble to take a screenshot. Greetings
I know I could easily just change the lighting style, but it doesn’t feel the same, it feels more restricting and not as organized imo. I want to know fully what I’m getting and having a preset deciated to a certain look. not having to enable or disable settings in 2 presets, things feel less organized, and less compartmentalized!
I’m right, when I saw that for the first time it seemed strange and confusing, not so much because of difficulty or something like that, but because it’s not very attractive. But hey, it will be worth it to have more than 60 bolts on the local lights.
I agree, but also disagree! it feels as if roblox is trying to hide/rid itself of voxel lighting! it’d be nice to have a 3rd preset! so any admins reading this, please add a 3rd preset for voxel lighting!
