I’m surprised this feature request have aged a year and we still got no response from roblox admins, kinda like in light range limit increase request (although they did respond, but then all we have is radio silence again. been 6+ months zzz…)
What bothers me more is that outline thickness for highlights is already a thing, but isn’t officially available in Highlight instance itself.
You can find this a thing in Outlines selection style, here’s example below.
It’s configurable through Studio Settings > Studio > Hover Line Thickness, and there is no problem with outline whatsoever.
All of this just begs question why won’t engineers expose the thickness property to highlight instance (yes ik it’s much harder in reality than what it seems, but what I showed proves there is nothing bad happening with outline in the screenshot)
EDIT: Apparently, thickness property ACTUALLY exists in Highlight instance, but for whatever reason it is locked to Roblox Script security. You can try checking API dumps and see it yourself. I have no idea WHY it is locked away in the first place.
It really starts falling apart at higher values though… maybe they are trying to figure out a way for it to work correctly at these values? It could be the result of whatever black magic they are performing to get it to run well at 64 pixels thick, because, reading the explanation of how it works, it doesn’t seem likely it would work out-of-the-box at that value, nevertheless run well on my laptop.
Fair point, but I guess they could add thickness property but clamp it at point where it works all fine.
That would be beneficial while engineers are working on a solution
yes thats what i wanna use it for in my game, i want just the characters to have outlines so they stand out and have a cartoon type style. it would be so pretty but sadly they have still not added a thickness property also if anyone at roblox is reading this can it be a set thickness so the farther away the camera is from the outline is the smaller it would get. that way the outlines stay consistent
I would assume it’s locked down because the thicker the outline goes, the more expensive the shader calculations get. This is probably prohibitive on anything that isn’t a dev machine, so Roblox doesn’t want people to shoot themselves in both kneecaps with it.
E.g. Sobel edge detection uses two 3x3 windows to filter the image to produce a new image for the outline. This means to produce each pixel it does 18 texture samples of the input image (or half as many if you can cache). If you want a thicker outline, you need a bigger window, which means more samples per pixel (4x4*2=32, 5x5*2=50 samples).
Thats the whole point. We want to have the ability for it to scale over distance so that the outline isnt as noticeable at a distance. Having a static line thickness at a distance makes the outline even bigger than the object itself (to the cameras perspective) when the object is small, meanwhile its almost unnoticeable when the object is a lot bigger or the camera is super close. But if we could scale the outline, we wouldnt need to deal with that kind of problem.
Please add. We also want to be able to control if the highlight thickness is constantly a set pixel value(it will appear to shrink when you’re closer and grow when you’re farther), which is the only option we currently have,
Or,
If the highlight thickness will be proportional to the model size, thus appearing to have constant thickness as if it were a 3D object itself.
Basically Offset vs. Scale, please, if performant
Edit:
Didn’t realize that scale and offset was already mentioned
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,
