More Lighting & Enviroment controls

Feature Requests Engine Features
1

G’day people of Roblox!

I really hope the Roblox engine team considers extending shadow render distance far beyond what we have today.

Right now, shadows fade out way too close to the camera. For normal games it might be acceptable, but for large-scale and space environments it completely breaks immersion. When you’re trying to build massive ships, stations, planets, or open space scenes, having shadows disappear just a short distance away makes everything feel flat and artificial. It’s basically impossible to create a truly immersive space game with the current shadow limits.

We need shadow distances that reach way, way further than they do now — even if it’s an optional high-quality setting for creators and players with powerful hardware.

On top of that, we currently don’t have enough lighting and environment controls to properly create realistic space atmospheres. Things like fine control over ambient light falloff, multiple directional light sources (for stars/suns), better control over scattering, glow, and exposure, and more flexible sky/space environment settings would go a long way. Right now, even with Future lighting, space scenes often end up looking flat or “gamey” instead of deep and cinematic.

Also, a quick note about the new 4K texture feature: it doesn’t seem to work with skyboxes. Even when using high-resolution textures, skyboxes still appear capped in quality or get downscaled, which defeats the whole point for space scenes where the skybox is a major visual element.

Making everything to a smaller Stud scale but keeping the perception of a big scale does not work either because then Shadows completely disappear on smaller objects!

Please consider:

  • Much longer configurable shadow distances.
  • Longer shadow distances for higher end machines, just like how Texture Streaming works.
  • More advanced lighting and environment controls for space scenes.
  • Fixing or enabling true 4K textures for skyboxes.

These changes would make a huge difference for developers trying to push visual fidelity and build immersive large-scale or space experiences on Roblox.


14 Likes
2

Let me tell you that big public corporations don’t care about the masses. They just care about what the investors think.

6 Likes
3

Would it not make investors happy to have more realistic graphics on Roblox? Currently we are very limited.

3 Likes
4

Roblox is a company that wants to spend as little as possible. It seems like the graphics are good enough for investors to keep investing. Additionally, companies don’t like to take risks. Roblox should have never gone public. Personally I’ve lost hope in making any feature/bug requests as they really don’t care except when it can effect their profits.

4 Likes
5

Funnily enough they added emissive maps and now 4k streaming to studio beta which I doubt most investors would even care about.

1 Like
6

Who even needs 4k streaming? We have so many feature requests and engine bugs that are unresolved for years, some even a decade old.

7

For large scale objects, instead of a big building having a different texture per mesh, you can just have one 4k Texture for that building. Especially important for Space Games, City Games etc, it may sound counter intuitive but it will actually make better performance having way less textures with 4K maps.

2 Likes