bumping it, I need this feature
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Bumping this. As a VFX designer, highlights are already pretty useful despite their limitations. Highlight enhancements or new visual properties like this would enhance Roblox’s already advancing visual effects scene,
or just let us set the value to what works for each use cases
bumping this - would be really nice to see this implemented!
3 Likes
Bumping, it really would be great if the highlight thickness was adjustable.
So I have a bit of graphics experience, let me throw my hat into the ring.
There is an algorithm out there that in theory would let Roblox implement arbitrary-thickness outlines, called the Jump Flood algorithm. I’m not going to dive into how it works, but I’ve implemented it before, and it scales well (cost increases linearly w/ a doubling of thickness).
However, to implement that algorithm (which would be necessary to support arbitrary-thickness outlines) you would need to have two fullscreen buffers, transferring data between them over the course of a few render passes to gradually fill in all the data that’s needed to render the outlines. That isn’t free, and I’m not surprised that Roblox finds that cost unaffordable.
From the recent announcement of Highlights on Mobile:
Highlight Outlines is a challenging feature to implement efficiently on mobile hardware. We’ve worked hard to bring Highlights Outlines to mobile in as a performant way as we can, but they do require GPU resources and can average around 1ms of GPU time for the first Highlight.
On mobile, the first Highlight rendered on the screen incurs most of the performance cost and you should not see a significant performance impact of using additional Highlights. Note, however, that Highlights are more costly in performance the more they cover the screen. This is only true on mobile, Highlights’ screen coverage does not impact performance on other platforms.
In the replies, they reveal that - indeed - they do not use Jump Flood, but instead use a novel algorithm:
And go into more detail about this specific feature request:
Thickness setting
Thickness is currently impossible to be set on mobile, due to the heavy optimizations. I think I’ve mentioned this couple times. We developed completely new algorithm especially for mobile to actually support highlights (outlines mostly) correctly.So don’t expect thickness control being added. It is a technical limitation
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Due to a mobile technical limitation correct? So that loops us back around to the question on when will we have the ability to disable mobile from our games entirely as roblox being a cloud based platform does already have its own set of limitations which I do understand that, but having to be restricted from a larger range of features due to mobile limitations is an annoyance for developers who choose not to support mobile.
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Mobile is north of 80% of the entire Roblox player base. There is no business case for Roblox to make their platform less mobile compatible, and indeed they’ve spent most of this year seemingly working to close the gap between mobile and desktop. Because we on here are using Roblox Studio, we are all inherently biased towards desktop, even though it doesn’t reflect the reality of who’s playing at all. Desktop is just a vocal, small minority.
The chance that you’ll get a mobile off-switch that enables more features is approximately 0.
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Its not really noticeable but it wouldn’t hurt to have i suppose
Hello, I am not sure if this would be any use to you but I made an effect some time ago which could technically imitate highlights with adjustable thickness and offset. Here is the link An effect similar to stereoscopic 3d effect/chromatic aberration/anaglyph I hope it helps. And here is an example of what it might look like based on the settings you give the scripts
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Bump, roblox needs this desperately.
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bump feature needs to be added
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bump this thing is literally what we need for highlight improvements
bump, needs to be added, highlight can be super hacky but with outline thickness its gonna be way better
Bump. This would be very useful for some of my projects
Bump. This could seriously make highlights WAY better.
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Highlights have been out for years and there haven’t been any really significant changes/additions to them, and they still have the 31 instances limit. They deserve more love from Roblox, in my opinion…
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One day, things will change.
One day…
Bump, i need this for my vfx, roblox please…
Still cant believe that this isnt a feature. I’d imagine this would be available from release if there wasn’t a roadblock that prevents easy implementation of this, but it’s already been a good while since the Highlight instance was released.