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. Iâm not going to dive into how it works, but Iâve 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 thatâs needed to render the outlines. That isnât free, and Iâm 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. Weâve 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, Highlightsâ 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 Iâve mentioned this couple times. We developed completely new algorithm especially for mobile to actually support highlights (outlines mostly) correctly.So donât 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.
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 theyâve 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 doesnât reflect the reality of whoâs playing at all. Desktop is just a vocal, small minority.
The chance that youâll get a mobile off-switch that enables more features is approximately 0.
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Its not really noticeable but it wouldnât 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
5 Likes
Bump, roblox needs this desperately.
1 Like