We’re excited to announce an immediate improvement to Highlights, the feature that allows you to add a silhouette outline and/or a solid overlay interior to its parent Part or MeshPart!
We have increased the maximum number of Highlight instances you can have in an experience’s DataModel to 255. This is live today!
With the limit raised to 255, you can apply highlights to significantly more objects. Whether you’re creating glowing outlines for collectible items, highlighting interactive elements, or adding subtle flair to your environments, this change should simplify workflows that previously required scripting workarounds to manage a limited number of Highlight instances.
A Note on Performance
While you now have up to 255 Highlights, remember that all rendering features have a performance impact. Please use this feature thoughtfully:
Drawing Cost: Each highlighted object is drawn individually, which incurs a drawcall cost.
Post-processing Cost: If any highlight is visible on screen, there’s a post-processing cost.
We look forward to seeing the new possibilities this unlocks!
Will it be possible to keep the old limit of 32 (or set our own within the bound), for performance on lower-end devices, or does the engine dynamically decide how many are rendered, based on the device and/or quality setting.
How does the engine decide which higlights to render when we go over the cap.
I’m pretty sure the latter has been answered before but I’ve never played around with highlights that much.
Regardless, increasing the limit of highlights is amazing and I’m sure it has usecases in some places.
This is a great change and in my opinion a good direction for QoL changes!
Feel free to unlock/loosen the limits of the multitudes of other engine features in the future (such as lighting and shadows), we REALLY appreciate them!
Nice work. I have to ask, would it be possible for us to get the thickness property? I know thickness is something highlights already support and im not exactly sure why it isnt a public property yet. And considering the new highlight cap and thickness property support, what about allowing the ability for us to stack highlights? Also… color gradients for highlights? Yes?
Awesome change for making highlights more useful.
Would still love a “reverse occlusion” option though.
IE only show the highlight when the object is occluded. That way it can be used to show things that are partly behind walls etc.
Another major one would be a “proper” way of applying highlights to transparent objects. IE wanting to be able to highlight something that isn’t actually there. Maybe just an ignore transparency property?
Oh and being able to highlight based on things other than models or parts. Perhaps based on collectionservice tags?
One related question, is there any timeline for supporting highlights on transparent parts again? It was teased a while ago, and I want to know if there’s any future plans for migration.
A lot of people might not realize just how much more this is. From 31 to 255 highlights, we’re seeing a 8.2x amount of possible highlights, and we probably wont even need half of that. Good on you Roblox, now just optimize them and make them work better on mobile clients.
