Compatibility replacing Legacy on 17th of June 2019

[28Pixels]

Could you explain why you prefer legacy over the other Lighting.Technology options?

[Maximum_ADHD]

I mentioned this in another thread, but I’ll post it here too.

For anyone who wants Roblox’s legacy tone-mapping while using shadow maps, I found a ColorCorrectionEffect configuration that gets it pretty much on-point.

[GeorgeOfAIITrades]

For day time it’s spot on, but night time it becomes awfully hazy.

It’s not quite legacy, but removing some of the negative Contrast is a big help.

[Maximum_ADHD]

I think this can be fixed by adjusting the contrast based on the Y-value of the sun’s direction. I’ll look into it more when I get the chance.

[JuuzouBlitz]

“not nicely compatible with the new lighting system” What does that even mean? legacy is a different lighting system than voxel, why does it need to be compatible. It worked just fine before they introduced voxel or anything else.

[PeZsmistic]

These quotes are relevant.

@ConvexRumbler

Having legacy in our code base has couple negative points

• We have to dedicate our engineering time to maintain the old code. We can use this time better, like working new features for You
• Having Legacy and Voxel is causing ~5% rendering slowdown across all platforms. Lets get those 5% percent back

@zeuxcg

We need to remove Legacy. It’s problematic because it requires us to maintain a lot of configurations that are fundamentally different from what we want to have; the need to be able to switch technology between games during teleports requires us to inject some code in the shaders that can seamlessly switch between “old” and “new” math even on lowest quality, and we pay a performance penalty for this.

@zeuxcg

we won’t spend much time testing legacy mode and might need to start introducing small breaking changes to optimize Voxel pipeline in places where two pipelines share code. This won’t happen immediately upon release of course, and we plan to keep Legacy around for some time, but at some point Legacy levels will start changing behavior.

These three posts by Zeuxcg are interesting if you’re curious why.

Compatibility replacing Legacy on 17th of June 2019

So let me start by saying that we actually read things that you post Feedback is welcome, even if it’s negative (but please be polite and respectful of the work we’ve done), but keep in mind that we may disagree with some of it and as a result not act on it. Why did we introduce Compatibility if it’s so obviously different than Legacy and looks worse? Well, looking better was never the point of Compatbility. Let me walk you through the decisions we’ve made and explain why we made them. …

Compatibility replacing Legacy on 17th of June 2019

Ok, so the real difference in Voxel is that it’s a different mathematical foundation. Rendering pipelines are like 50% math; by changing the fundamental assumptions about the color space you work in, you have to redo a lot of the work. We had to very substantially change the water shading for example because the way things were done before were effectively hacked together up until they look right; it’s harder to do this when the underlying foundation is sane, you have to be more rigorous about y…

Compatibility replacing Legacy on 17th of June 2019

The reason why system migration takes a while in Roblox is because usually, when you switch from one system to another, you’re going to have behavior differences; no matter how good or bad they are, they can break games. The games become unplayable. This is a problem. This usually doesn’t happen for rendering features - one day outlines will disappear from Roblox (sorry) but it’s hard to imagine many games that would become unplayable as a result. Lighting is different. There’s three common iss…

[AureateGold]

Well this is a perfectly prime example of rushing into things without any idea of what could happen.

(Anyone remember the compatibility mode fiasco)

Either way, this is mainly my opinion:

Yes, the new FIS (Future is Bright) system is looking pretty dandy from messing around with it, but like all of the other features each one is special and to be used upto the developers idea, and should they want legacy in my opinion they should be able to have it.

Getting rid of legacy lighting is like getting rid of a failed social media post, your trying to cover it up and that’s what in my opinion I believe Roblox are doing.

My personal opinion: Keep legacy and just keep working on shadowmap and let the developer have choice on what lighting system they wish to use.

[Rocky28447 (Rocky)]

Forgive me if I’m wrong, but your post does not even seem to consider the negative performance impact (which, iirc is quite considerable) of Roblox supporting 2 separate lighting engines.

Compatibility exists for a reason. It exists for those who want the look and feel of legacy (no HDR, no shadowmaps, etc) albeit with slightly different colors. I think the people who still want legacy can learn to live with slightly different looking colors so nobody has to deal with the negative performance impact.

[jackTabsCode (Jack)]

Did you even read any of the posts quoted in the post right above yours? It explains everything. Frankly your comment is very shallow to the reasons needed for removing Legacy

[RuizuKun_Dev (Kitsune)]

I don’t mind removing the Legacy option but at least provide a setting that mimics how Legacy looks while using Voxel, Shadow maps and other new future options, I’m pretty sure a lot of us wants our games to look the way they currently look.

(Compatibility isn’t a viable option for me, and it’s probably going to be removed soon iirc)

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I think this can be fixed by adjusting the contrast based on the Y-value of the sun’s direction. I’ll look into it more when I get the chance.

Any updates on that? Legacy is going to be replaced really soon.

[ConvexRumbler]

Update: Compatibility replacing Legacy on 17th of June 2019

[Rocky28447 (Rocky)]

This is actually one of the few things suggested that I actually agree with; being able to pick and choose what lighting features are enabled rather than having a bunch of preset lighting modes. For example, being able to turn on shadow maps but “turn off” HDR or have legacy tonemapping with HDR. I’m not sure how doable something like this is, however, as I have no clue what the lighting engine is like on the backend.

[gridgalaxy (casey)]

Im most excited for when all lights will create shadows

[zeuxcg]

(Compatibility isn’t a viable option for me, and it’s probably going to be removed soon iirc)

We don’t have plans to remove Compatibility - the entire point of this mode is to do our best to automatically port the content to the new system while doing so in the way that we can support long term.

[JuuzouBlitz]

Okay i understand better now thanks

[ConvexRumbler]

Update: Legacy was removed, all games set in Legacy are now running in Compatibility.

[gluGPU (Glu)]

Technology.Legacy will not be coming back ever. Did you not read what @zeuxcg said in the posts above? Sorry if this comes off as rude, but you need to read before you post. There are a number of reasons why Legacy is bad for Roblox (like a 5% performance decrease) which contribute to it’s removal.

[Elttob (dphfox)]

also, this was delayed specifically to work out the kinks in the system, so there’s been more than enough time to transition.

In other news, yay future

[NobleReign (Noble)]

goodbye legacy, hello performance! i’ll miss your black neon though
although i’m glad that the roblox team is going to keep the compatibility mode. at least all the old games won’t decompose even more by becoming pitch black.

[RaguelTroyard]

While it is a bit late I still disagree with this change and feel it should of been worked out from the visual bugs, I also see it pointless to reduce render times with this when popular games will use the other 2 lighting effects that have that extra render that was removed by this change, personally my players have been unhappy about the changes, however if the bugs can be fixed I’m sure it can be utilized better.