Realistic water terrain on Mobile

Hello! I would like to make my first post regarding the terrain graphics on Mobile.

As you can see (If you also play on mobile) there is a big problem with the realistic water terrain and graphics on Mobile.

For some reason, no matter what, the water in my games along with all the other games I have ever played all have gorgeous, high-quality transparent water on my laptop.

However, when I play on my Ipad (Ipad pro 1st Gen) the water seems to be really opaque with some reflectance.

This is not the only device with this problem. I have seen many other various devices with the EXACT same terrain problem including iPhone 7 and Ipad mini 4.

So far, I have tried making the graphics quality settings higher while in-game but that doesn’t seem to work either.
I have also tried going to FILE, settings and changed the rendering to Level 21 but nothing seems to work.

Unfortunately, as this is my first post, I can not send any photos. I also hope my topic is appropriate and I wish you a good day.

Thanks for reading!

5 Likes

Do you have a solution to fix this? I honestly don’t think this can be fixed.

This is most likely due to hardware specs on mobile. Trying to support many different platforms and even more so with the amount of mobile devices requires some compromises in order to support a playable game on lower spec devices. That is probably the best looking water that will be supported for now, unless they can optimize it in the future to allow for better rendering.

3 Likes

Thanks for replying.
If this isn’t possible, I’d hope to put realistic terrain on at least the more newer and stronger mobile devices such as the latest iPad pro’s. Perhaps on the older devices, it may not work out such as iPhones 5 and lower or the oldest iPads. However, I hope for the realistic terrain on newer stronger mobile devices.
Thanks

2 Likes

No problem. I can confirm that on my iPhone 8 water is still opaque and reflective but it doesn’t necessarily look bad. I’m sure as they work on the engine, we may see some upgrades to low-end graphics. Maybe even with the new PBR terrain update. In the mean time, I would suggest maybe some post processing effects like Atmosphere to make it look a little better.

2 Likes

Thanks I will try this :smile: :grinning: Atmosphere can give a nice cool effect. Even so, I hope for this update to come in the future

1 Like

Anything that reflects has to be Raytraced a very small amount, because it distorts the rendering. Usually this Raytracing does not require a insanely powerful GPU. It can be done with a regular GPU or even the CPU.

Phones do not have this Raytracing capability because if it was forced by Roblox, the phone would actually explode (not even joking. Happened to me once)

Last thing roblox wants is to have people’s phones exploding.

1 Like

That is partially incorrect on a technical level, Ray tracing is a method for tracing lightrays (Added benifit is reflections). Roblox is pretty much incapable of raytracing in any major way currently (only a few demos that lag too much for use in an actual game. Water uses SSR or in other words it uses the cameras image. I’m pretty sure the “Shader” Roblox uses for water isn’t completely compatible with mobile gpus so rather than have a ton of versions of the same shader they just made one that works on all platforms. The difference that could cause this (that i can think of) is the “Architecture” or design of the processor in mobile (ARM) vs Pc’s and consoles (X86)

Edit, Ray tracing and SSR are possible on mobile but render times would be almost infinite.

It isn’t a lag issue as even a 10 year-old “Netbook” that is barely supported by windows can do ssr smoothly in ROBLOX more of a saving storage space on devices.

Note : Im not 100% sure the storage thing is true as i dont work for Roblox but i can almost completely confirm its a compatibility thing.

1 Like

raytraced reflections in roblox :skull:

A TI - 84 calculator can ray trace dude…

I have one of the worst computer ever and the realistic water works perfectly on 21 graphics.

For sure this will work on mobile.

Like…my phone works much better than my PC