As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to create realistic nighttime lighting and moonlight effects in my games. While Roblox provides the SunRays effect for daytime scenes, there is no equivalent tool for moonlight. This makes it challenging to achieve atmospheric night environments where the moon illuminates objects and casts soft light rays.
If this issue is addressed, it would improve my development experience because I could easily enhance nighttime scenes with dynamic moonlight, creating a more immersive experience for players. Currently, developers have to rely on workarounds such as using additional lights, ParticleEmitters, or manually creating glow effects, which are often resource-heavy and do not respond dynamically to changes in the environment or lighting.
Use Cases:
A horror or adventure game where players explore a forest at night and need subtle moonlight rays to guide their way.
Outdoor nighttime environments in roleplay or survival games where realism is important, such as beaches, mountains, or cityscapes under moonlight.
Any scenario where dynamic day-night cycles require smooth transitions from SunRays to moonlight effects without additional scripting or performance costs.
It’s a skybox, which is really normal in terms of game development even today.
However, the way that Roblox does it is incredibly outdated, it takes ages to figure out how to do, it uses individual images per face, the colors being SDR rather than HDR (white in a skybox isn’t actually white), and just now adding skybox orientation after quite literally a decade of barely any updates to the skybox.
Hell, even the cloud object you can add, was supposed to be updated way more, but surprise surprise, if it doesn’t actively earn money, you won’t get any updates. (For reference, last update was October 28, 2022)
To give moons a sunrays like effect, they’d 100p have to rewrite a bunch of things, as it’s ancient code at this point.
They gave a very reasonable explanation on why it hasn’t been updated in so long during an AMA, and unsurprisingly it has nothing to do with the feature “not actively earning money”.
I think SunRays shouldn’t even be linked to the sun any more; that they should be an object that we can attach to different objects, with the same properties as other light objects.
Absolutely. Personally, i’d love to see at least semi-realistic movement of celestial bodies, where the moon and sun can be in the sky at the same time, like in real life.
Bumping this because I’m encountering the same frustrations developing my game. The “Sun Rays Effect” should just be “Light Ray Effect” and a toggle property between Sun and Moon (and maybe a third option for some sort of custom object). At this point, the Sun and Moon shouldn’t behave much differently in terms of objects in a skybox. It’s up to the developer to decide what properties for both objects should be adjusted in which ways to make a Sun and Moon to their liking, including especially giving the Moon its own ray effect. I don’t know how these rays work behind the scenes, but I feel like carrying over that functionality from the Sun to the Moon when they already share so many similar technical properties shouldn’t be that difficult. I wonder if it might even be possible to figure out how to do ourselves.
