"The graphics on the Roblox client can get pretty good, but there’s a very noticeable limit to them that makes it very easy to tell it’s a Roblox game vs. a Unity/UE5 game. This is generally due to the lack of customizability within the game engine.
More lighting effects would help a ton, since the engine only has a limited atmosphere, sun rays, bloom, color correction, blur, depth of field, and color grading that only has one preset and no customizability."
Extra effects that should be added
Sharpen
Lensflare
Volume Scatter
Screen Warp
Chromatic
Color Grading (not just one preset with no ability to make your own)
motion blur
Bokeh Blur
Gaussian Blur
Highlight/Shadows
Custom Effect
Custom effects are instances where you can program how it works kinda like a shader.
this is the eternal struggle of roblox dev. u want that triple-A look, but the engine is heavily handcuffed by cross-platform optimization requirements.
the “roblox look” is exactly that—the lack of a deep, customizable post-processing stack. most of the effects on ur list (custom LUTs, volumetric scattering, lens dirt/distortion) require raw access to the frame buffer, which roblox blocks for security and to keep mobile performance stable.
u can fake some of this using ColorCorrection and Bloom settings, but it’s brittle and not granular enough. until they give us a proper “Post-Process Volume” system like UE5, or actual access to custom shaders (which is unlikely due to their security model), we’re just stuck layering native effects.
great list though—getting proper volumetric control would be an absolute game changer for atmosphere.
The one thing that has stopped me from liking my games on the graphics side of thing is due to the lack of lighting effects that are provided to us by Roblox. It would make the lives of so many developers so much easier, and make so many more games on Roblox look so much better if they could just add some of these effects in.
Wish they would stop caring so much about mobile optimization on every game including ones that don’t even have mobile support since it’s one of the things holding them back from making the games on their platforms look so much better.
They’ve previously mentioned during an RDC Q&A the possibility of creating their own custom shader language, so it’s not actually as unlikely as you may think it would be.