As a Roblox developer, it’s currently impossible (or at least difficult) to have good lighting with Lighting.SpecularScale set to 1.
The automatic cube map reflection generation ruins a lot of scenes with dynamic lighting - i.e. guns, explosions, etc. The lighting from explosions & gun shots will bleed across an entire room even if the light source is turned off. Occasionally, the generated cube map reflections will look off.
There should be an option under lighting to completely disable the automatic cube map generation to allow developers to have more realistic metallic surfaces w/o sacrificing lighting quality.
I love cube maps but Roblox automated generation is absolutely horrid.
What I would want is the ability to generate cubemaps wherever and whenever I want.
That way I can utilize cubemaps to fully customize every area in a game and not depend on the flawed automatic generation.
Roblox automates almost everything because they think some features are “too advanced” for developers to handle themselves but I WANT that manual control.
I don’t understand why we can’t have both, auto cube maps are nice for newer devs and certain areas they aren’t super important, but manual cube maps would allow more experienced devs to really get fancy with building. It’s a shame as when cube maps were still in beta I swear they were manually placed? It shouldn’t be hard to support both, and even a mix, where if you are close enough to a manually placed cube map (maybe give it a range property) it will take priority over automatic cube maps.
There are currently 2 options available for you here to get rid of Environment Cubemaps without completely disabling specular lighting.
Option 1: While indoors, set the skybox to a pitch black one, then set game.Lighting.GlobalShadows to false
This effectively forces the engine to use the skybox as the cubemap source here. However this will disable the directional light shadows, so ideally only use this indoors where the sun will never be visible.
Option 2: Set EnvironmentSpecularScale to 0
Self explanatory, however this removes any specular lighting.
You could theoretically make your own cubemap system by utilizing option 1 and replacing the skybox with 6 SurfaceGui’s that are extremely large and cover the skybox. I remember a 3D skybox module utilized such tech. Then you could change the skybox to a precalculated cubemap that you desire it to be like. However the problem is, even if the skybox is e.g. 1024x1024 the cubemap will STILL reflect only 128x128 at most. I don’t know WHY the cubemaps are such low quality but I made a thread about that too.
exactly, even midrange phones are strong enough today, and the battery life shouldnt be much of an issue since it would use just a tiny bit more power (ssr isnt that demanding)
and even better if once and for all, roblox gives us the option to set individual graphics settings so we can adjust them to our liking (render distance, ssr, future lighting and its light distance, ssao, aa, dof, bloom, etc…)
Adding onto that, battery life whilst Roblox is running is almost non-existent eitherway. For example, leaving the avatar customization tab loaded while browsing through games to play already wastes more resources.
