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?
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Roblox doesn’t like implementing anything precalculated like baked lighting, physics, or static reflection probes. They want everything to be dynamic.
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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.
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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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how? i need this. bro
awdrhawgeathe
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Afaik he may just mean that he bumped up the Reflectance property to 3?
Although from the screenshot provided, the paint material (to me) seems like a custom material which has a very low Roughness map since the inbuilt Plastic / SmoothPlastic material are not nearly that specular. Ramping up the Reflectance value past ‘1’ on plastic parts has the unintended effect of exaggerating the colours on the part, which can be used for interesting effects.
Reflective parts will ‘reflect’ (not true reflection) the surrounding area through dynamic cube maps. This may not work on lower graphics settings.
(Material used: Metal)
(Material: SmoothPlastic, reflectance 1)
(Material: SmoothPlastic, reflectance 155)
There is a way to make reflective parts glow too, by adding a Highlight with a higher than normal FillTransparency (and set the FillColor to near-black, or experiment until right). This has the unintended effect of increasing the contrast on the object. But you have to use this sparingly, since there is a render limit of 31 highlight instances in your game at any one time.
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To address this, I want to start by saying that roblox has literally 0 need for raytracing. Ambient occlusion is very much a feature. I agree with baked lighting and displacement.
As for 8k textures, that is hard overkill. 2k would be more than enough for most games, and the lighting engine is okay in some cases. It is easy to find custom implementations of ray tracing, global illumination (especially on here, there are like over 5) that are free to use and would be more performant. Unions got optimized majorly in recent times and are more of an option for many. When restriced, creativity is key (especially on ROBLOX, where there is 0 liberty to do anything related to the engine and severe trickery is needed to get features like in other engines)
But this brings me to my conclusion. ROBLOX never intended for this to compete with other engines. It fits the graphical needs for most of roblox, and in reality, its sad, but nobody would use the extra graphical advancements or care to learn how to actualyl make great things. Like you said - great things are possible - not many are just willing to learn on ROBLOX.
ps: If you check release notes 641, roblox released unified lighting, which as i heard combines ambientocclusion on shadowmap + lighting on future.
**Future actually has AO, but it is more realistic because it uses secondary light and appears in mainly dim areas (all roblox lightng techs have AO far as I know and have seen). ShadowMap sticks the effect everywhere - which is very unoptimized and more unrealistic than future’s better approach.
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Yes I agree, 8k would be overkill, but 1k is way too low, 2k-4k is good for game design and anything in between 4k-8k is too overkill for the major playerbase of roblox, AO needs to be added for surface appearance, they need to add alot more to surface appearance like improve their transparency quality and include emission, ambient occlusion, displacement (not really needed but needed for some things.) Roblox can use pre-calculated cube maps just like what old games used for screen-space reflections but roblox isn’t doing it but only doing it for indoor spaces in a texture quality of 100x100 and 3 FPS, which keep in mind most games which play on the PS3 or Xbox 360 have a much higher cube map quality. Roblox doesn’t even add reflections in night-time which for some reason is a thing not sure if this was intended or not cuz it certainly shouldn’t be like that. Raytracing might be too much for roblox but still the current reflection system for Roblox sucks so hard.
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It works by adding 3 layers, first layer is the base layer being 0 transparency, while the reflection layer is glass to transparency 30 and the last one is 0.3 transparency to make it less specular.
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I agree completely. AO should be a feature on surfaceappearances, and the current AO built into the lighting engine needs improvement. As for reflections, they are possible but with extreme tricks. I do agree with your previous post, where you stated ROBLOX engineers refuse to optimise other things. It is good to note we can store images up to 8k. Also, emissivemaps are already in place for some people. (part of surfaceappearance).
Also, I doubt you can even call what roblox has right now reflections.
As for optimization, I fear ROBLOX leaves it too much in the hands of developers while giving us lackluster opt. Occlusion culling is great - but outside of that, what are we given? StreamingEnabled is ehhhh, with a plethora of its own issues, and the REAL issues require you to completely shred quality. I have a personal example - where a scene I was making had under 50,000 triangles, but used future lighting, and shadows contributed to 300,000 triangles. This is my fault for not optimising, yes, but the only “realistic” lighting mode we have right now can barely even run. ROBLOX has to give developers more control over the settings (allow control over AO strength, and things like shadow fidelity). The current graphics bar is atrocious going from 1-10, and instead, should be improved greatly to have specific selectors.
The lighting on ROBLOX is desolate and needs major improvements, (also, ShadowMap lacks normalmaps for local lights, while Voxel has them…). It is crazy to see Half Life 2 - a 20 year old game, with slight graphical enhancement recently, only fall short to ROBLOX in terms of graphics fidelity in textures and some real time lighting approaches (however HL2 also has reflections for water). This game can run on any hardware pretty much, while ROBLOX Future lags on a dumb setup - 3 overlapping shadows and your game will crash. (or try making a high density forest, optimized assets, and have lights.)
I also agree with engineers giving us unasked for updates. We are not asking for crazy things - bare minimum. (especially for advanced graphics features, things like 2k, 4k textures for example, these are taxing yes, so leave it up to the developer and warn them “Hey if you mass use these some people won’t be able to play”.)
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What? i onlu thought normals for local lights were only limited to Future. Reference images with explorer? i never seen those in voxel
Nope. ShadowMap inherently lacks normalmapping on local lights. I was told this, and I also noticed it. a game using shadowmap had some stud texture, at max graphics - it was flat. at 4 (when roblox auto reverts to voxel) it had indents (normal).
here;
IMAGES NOT MINE!!
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this is weird, isnt shadowmap > voxel?
and voxel meant to be simple?
Shadowmap is in my opinion overall terrible. Voxel is labeled as “simple” because it uses voxel grids for both global and lights. (ShadowMap does this too, but for local lights only, with shadowmapped global lighting). In my opinion, shadowmap is slightly betteer than voxel but lacks the quality of normals in most cases, and they both share having similar ambientocclusion (future has it too, though shadowmap has the strongest for whatever reason). shadowmap is only better cause it has HDR and perfect outdoor shadows, but they are minimally different.
any games you know which use voxel and has lights ima test this on my android device which is im typing from, cause the games i know uses future and 4th graphics level renders future
No clue. though aI did notice that future worked from 4 graphics. this is however mainly the shadowmapped indor lights and PBR.
Bump. I want realistic windows.
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Can’t replicate it in an Future-Lighting unsupported device, even when Lighting.Technology is Voxel.
What kind of device doesn’t support future… well regardless. I saw it when playing a game too, ya know how ROBLOX falls back to voxel at 4? I was playing on max graphics - no normals. (shadowmap). Reverted to 4, voxel, and normals popped up.
find the game here
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