Currently the most common complaint I hear is “why are we limited to so few colors” and 'why do we only have two blacks?". I think a very easy way to ease this pain is to allow for negative Reflectance. It goes from a scale of -1 to 1.
From 0 to -1 you have a linear transition from the parts original color to pitch black. This is how it works in the real world from what I understand (The less light that’s reflected the darker the object - Vantablack - Wikipedia).
This would solve a good chunk of the color issues by letting us create new colors simply by adding a negative reflectance modifier. I want a black between Black and Really black but there isn’t one. This would solve that. What if someone wants a dark green but doesn’t like the current greens? Problem solved.
I propose this because it seems like a very cheap (both network-wise and performance-wise) way to add a ton of ‘new’ colors with little effort.
Even though that’s better than trying to make Reflectance serve two purposes, I don’t think that’s a good solution either. Regardless of which of these two are implemented, if either, developers are still going to want to be able to choose any color they want for parts because neither of these implementations allow for that – they only extend the available palette. I would rather ROBLOX spend time figuring out how to do Color3 right than have more colors introduced through a half-assed hack which is then made obsolete by a future implementation that allows for an even larger palette.
One thing to add, I get the impression that Reflectance refers to specular reflectance (e.g., mirror-like reflectance), whereas the property you speak of is diffuse reflectance (white vs. black). They make sense to be controlled separately (as they currently are, that is, through BrickColor).
Edit:
I don’t mean to be so negative (hah). Your concern for a lack of colors has merits and it’s good you’re pitching ideas on how to solve it. I would just prefer some other solutions (custom color palettes, using Color3, etc.).
I voted yes, but I wouldn’t agree that reverse Reflectance should mean darkening from original color. In real world, that reverse Reflectance would be just tarnishing. I agree with above too, something like HSV would be much more efficient for such purposes
But beside that, tarnishing an object would be quite useful as well, and it is a great idea to be implemented
Personally I could care less for the color reasons.
One of the main reasons I’d like a property like this is because on materials like SmoothPlastic, I could instead use negative reflectance to lower the specular color, NOT the actual brick’s color, which would allow me to create a smooth block that doesn’t reflect light.
This so much. I use SpecialMeshes with MeshParts to get this effect with materials (get the specular without the normal, bump, or diffuse) because the way light reflects off an object says a lot about its material and the assumptions placed on it by people and the assumptions the player makes on the world based on the assumptions placed on the material.
