Sadly, I don’t believe this will happen:
https://devforum.roblox.com/t/should-roblox-allow-hardware-acceleration-for-local-scripts/2933686/11
Personally, I liked the old one. The pastel colors are a little bit harder to see, but I like the new font!
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I’ve noticed that a side-effect of Unified lighting is that the range at which the engine renders lights in “future quality” is significantly less than what it is with the future technology.
Here’s some videos to demonstrate this difference:
Studio Beta Off / Future Technology:
Studio Beta On / Realistic & Prioritize On:
Studio Beta On / Realistic & Prioritize Off:
Here are some of my thoughts on this range decrease.
Given that with PrioritizeLightingQuality Enabled means that lighting is crucially important, I feel that this range decrease is quite severe in comparison with the standard Future technology
Also, I feel it’s pretty clear that this isn’t the same perceptible visual quality.
In regards to the shorter shading distance from PrioritizeLightingQuality set to Disabled I feel that that should still be the case, but if PrioritizeLightingQuality is set to Enabled then it should result in lighting that has the same range as future technology, and if not it should be much closer at least.
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Will we ever be able to change the lighting style dynamically through scripts soon, through this unified lighting engine?
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Hi,
Thanks for the question. We have considered it. Do you mind telling us how you would use these properties if they were scriptable?
Best,
M0bsterLobster
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Being able to change technology would be good for different areas in a game.
Let’s imagine a horror game where it is realistic lighting. In the game, there could a section where the player is tasked to go to sleep where they enter an area that uses soft lighting to be simulate a dream. And it will switch back to realistic lighting when the player exits the dream state.
You could put the lighting style on the light objects themselves, like surface light or point light, so we can have different types of lights in the same game without having to change all lights at once.
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Got it, thank you.
We’ll see what’s possible and keep y’all updated 
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I hope you gonna left developers change settings of lighting via local script!
Or just change render distance for low graphics.
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I think there is a bug with this as none of my lights show up when selecting LightingStyle=Soft and PrioritizeLightingQuality=true
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I saw that BillboardGui’s Can cast shadows and have Light reflected on them, I acutely think that this is a cool feature and instead of fixing the glitch the devs should add a switch to turn this on and off inside of the GUI. This would really expand the uses of BillBoardGuis!
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I managed to fix it, thank you @xyrafrost. There seems to be a weird bug where if I select LightingStyle=Soft and PrioritizeLightingQuality=true I need to have GlobalShadows=true. Making GlobalShadows=false keeps the same lighting but when changing LightingStyles from Realistic back to Soft, all of the lights disappear until making GlobalShadows=true.
As a performance settings for games where lighting isn’t actually important for the gameplay.
I’ve been a developer for a poorly optimized roleplay game for the past 4 years and we use future because it’s absolute eye-candy (and after 4 years of using it, most of the game was built with it in mind) but it does make it hard for lower spec players to run the game at all without having to turning their graphics settings down super low and being able to only see a few studs ahead at any moment which is a shame because there are plenty of other aspects about the game world we handcrafted that’s worth being able to see beyond fancy colorful lights and sharply casted shadows.
There are plenty of games the visuals aren’t actually the cornerstone of the gameplay or even relevant to the gameplay so it’s not important, but being able to run the game is important especially since Roblox, as a game engine, lacks any discrete graphics options for the players to change (and view distance is tied to the only graphics setting ingame)
I’m sure there is a lot more optimizing our team could do on our end (and we are always trying to optimize our game better) beyond crossing our fingers that lighting technology becomes scriptable but this would be a good handicap as well.
Vice versa, it could serve as an experimental fancy graphics setting for games that don’t use realistic or high priority lighting quality, but want to offer the option to players without having to use external programs (Bloxstrap comes to mind) just to force a lighting technology on the client end.
Roblox is very much an engine so giving developers more control over these things beyond just changing it in studio and it being set in stone would be huge for many games.
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I hate this update. I don’t notice any major performance benefits between ‘Prioritize Lighting Quality’ on on or off with future lighting, and with it on, it’s still different than what it used to be! The draw distance on the lighting detail of future lighting + Prioritize Lighting Quality ON is awful, I have a building in my game, and on the other side of the intersection looking at the building, it’s lighting quality goes to that ugly no-detail lights, then it transitions to the high-detail once I’ve crossed the intersection in game. IT’S LITERALLY THAT BAD. As this is not in actual roblox yet, but in studio, I decided to drive around in my game (In actual roblox without this update) and the difference is crazy, the distance you can see the lighting quality (On highest graphics setting) is WAY better).
Instead of this garbage, please put resources into developing a system that prevents lights from just turning off abruptly when zoomed out, the helicopters in my game wanna fly up high at night, seeing the people they’re chasing down below, but they can’t if it’s pitch black on the streets from their perspective. But obviously you do this to save performance, but AT LEAST allow developers to increase/decrease the distance of light details or the point at which lights are rendered instead of just handing us a super low, fixed draw distance.
I’ve spent like 4 years developing this game and the thing that bugs me the most is the lack of control developers have over draw distances of stuff like: When the different LODs of meshes when they’re set to performance mode switch, light-detail distance, light distance itself, even content-streaming is so poorly made it stops generating imposter-meshes for objects far away past a certain amount, and again with streaming (I know I’m going off topic but), there is limited control over the entire system, why can’t we set our own imposter meshes for stuff like trees to turn into billboards?
My point is, Roblox, if you’re going to add these big changes to existing systems, AT LEAST, give developers WAY more control over them, so that they can decided what the appropriate distance they see light detail is. How do you know if the experience is a city that needs a large render distance?!
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Roblox on their way to reinvent the lightbulb:
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These new changes actually seem to be a downgrade the distance the future lighting is visible.
With the following images you can observe the change of distance the future lighting is visible when looking down the hallway.
Before unified lighting: (Future lighting technology)
After unified lighting: (Realistic lighting + Preserve lighting quality)
It would be nice to be given an option to modify the distance the future lighting occurs or atleast have it reverted to what it used to be.
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Please let us customize the distance at which you can see shadows and lights. Currently ROBLOX’s shadow and lighting systems do NOT scale well with massive city like maps. In my current city I’m building I have to turn global shadows off because there are multiple instances I’ve run into where the whole building’s shadow cant render at once, only maybe a third of it at a time. Another issue this causes is shadow pop in, like for example if you have very fast vehicles in your game it causes shadows to pop in and out when travelling at hundreds of studs a second.
Currently I have to opt for a very flat lighting style because it’s the only style that looks good with a map of this size. I have to use brightness 0, global shadows off, with an ambient of 255,255,255 while also limiting myself to using the default ROBLOX skybox because it’s the only one that still has a sun when you set the brightness to 0 (Please don’t get rid of this or at least make it a feature to enable the sun at brightness 0 on all skyboxes). PLEASE give us more customization over things like this.
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Basically the main takeaway from this update is that we can now change lighting technology at RUNTIME. This was something that wasn’t previously available before as you would have to select your lighting technology for your game, and it would be set to that for every device on the platform.
Prior to this update, the main issue was devices with old or underpowered hardware cannot afford to run newer lighting technologies (Shadowmap and Future) either because of performance costs or lack of API support, meaning that falling back to more compatible technology (Voxel), which provides an unpolished presentation due to how drastically different the technologies are compared to one another.
From a gameplay perspective, this can result in an absence of immersion and lighting issues (e.g. light leaking, lights being too dark or too bright, lights being incorrectly placed/sized, etc) which could be gameplay altering depending if the game is very reliant on lighting; For example horror games.
Now that we have the ability to change these technologies at runtime, developers can add a toggle for different technologies and fine-tune and optimize lighting for lower end devices, providing a much better experience for people without latest-gen hardware.
Also for some reason the high quality light rending range has been massively decreased for some reason.
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my game currently usus future, but it gets all mid end devices to 15fps with 4 graphics, but at 1 the render dist is soo short and its important for my game, if we can change technology to voxel ingame using scripts and custom menu, then better perf for mid-low end players, same with unified
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