Sorry, It’s graphics were way ahead of it’s time so I actually thought it was ray-tracing, but couldn’t Roblox use the same thing Blur did? Since the pre-calculated cubemap worked for Blur and it was running on Xbox 360s and PS3s shouldn’t roblox have no trouble implementing it?
Roblox doesn’t like implementing anything precalculated like baked lighting, physics, or static reflection probes. They want everything to be dynamic.
Indeed, cubemaps are extremely efficient and do give good visuals if used properly. To the point to where, to this day, they are still the standard in many engines if you want to create environments with reflections that you don’t expect to change very much. Roblox could very easily add these for all devices, low end mobile devices included, with only a negligible performance hit.
The issue is hinted in the method of generating these cubemaps, pre-calculated. These can be high quality and fancy looking, but they can’t update dynamically, this means that they have very good performance, but say if a player walked in front of a mirror, they wouldn’t show up in the mirror, only the environment around the mirror would show.
Additionally, pre-calculated cubemaps require a probe to be placed in the 3D space to base the cubemaps around. (which I won’t get into for technical reasons, but the basic gist is that it’s taking a lot of pictures around that probe.)
Roblox’s engine developers believe that this is a design flaw, and so they won’t be adding pre-calculated cubemaps. Instead, they created a different version of cubemaps which they call “Indoor Dynamic Environment Maps” however, for all but a few situations, these are less than stellar and I know plenty of people who aren’t even aware that these exist. They’re difficult to implement, low quality, don’t capture humanoids, and have a lot of other caveats.
Unfortunately, I don’t know if we’re likely to get better reflections anytime soon, Roblox is so committed to supporting low end devices, yet also simultaneously does not want anything to be static, so the options are extremely limited.
I seriously don’t know why won’t Roblox fix their CPU and memory optimization and say that they’re not adding ray-tracing or baked lighting, displacement, or ambient occlusion due to them being “performance intensive” even when roblox parts and unions are hellishly unoptimized. If you export a union to blender, you would see what I’m talking about cause each vertice is connected to every single other vertice in the mesh it is in. And then they add terrible studio features which we don’t even use. Roblox has alot of potential, realistic games can be done but needs alot of experiene with lighting and textures and due to us being limited in those things (1K textures + terrible lighting) you won’t see as much realistic games as you would with game studios such as Unity and Unreal Engine. If Roblox finally adds the 8k textures we could at least see a good quality improvement.
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