Rendering Updates - June 2017

Updates Announcements
#1

This is a thread with rendering updates for this month! Thanks to @maxvee, @programeow, @Qiblox and @zeuxcg for working on these.

Particle lighting

In a continuing effort to light all the things, Roblox now supports light influence for particle emitters. Now Smoke and any ParticleEmitter object with LightInfluence=1 will be affected by lighting and shadows. Similar to UI objects, you can set LightInfluence to any value between 0 and 1 to get a blend (intermediate values can be important to tune the effects better).

This is available on all platforms and on all quality levels (lighting is slightly higher fidelity on higher quality levels).

Trails

If you have somehow missed the Trail release, check out this thread:

http://devforum.roblox.com/t/trail-update-available-in-studio

Trails are available on all platforms except for very old mobile versions; there are some followup fixes to behavior (e.g. making sure that the old trail segments persist after disabling and re-enabling the trail) and new features (FaceCamera property) that are currently only available on desktop & Studio and will roll out to all platforms in the coming weeks.

Various fixes and improvements

We always work on a mix of large and small things, and a number of smaller fixes shipped this month:

  • ParticleEmitter now has SpreadAngle property which provides support for asymmetrical emission cones
  • Fix MeshPart Decal Color/Transparency (after breaking it :blush:)
  • Fix water and part reflection rendering on iPhone/iPad (after breaking it :blush:)
  • Update Marble material to make tiling less aggravating let’s not talk about Concrete
  • Fix camera clipping into thin parts (<0.5 studs), for good this time
  • Fix SurfaceGui transparency sorting in some cases
  • Fix coarse terrain LOD geometry rendering close by in some rare cases
  • Fix graphics initialization on some ancient Android phones
  • Enable full-resolution (retina) 2D UI rendering on iPhone 5
  • Fix some crashes in microprofiler UI

Memory/performance improvements

This section is pretty light this month; we were focusing on several large projects in this area but none of them ended up shipping in June. More updates next month. We did ship one thing:

  • SurfaceGui rendering is up to 2x faster on large/complex levels

As usual please report issues that you think are associated with these updates, either in this thread or in Bug Reports forum.

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#2

Do we have full resolution 2D UI rendering on all other mobile devices?

1 Like
#3

On all other iOS devices - yes, Android devices - no. Stay tuned.

edit: actually, on “plus” iPhones (6+/6s+/7+) we render 2D UI at a reasonably high resolution but not quite native resolution. We’re looking into this as well.

3 Likes
#4

Are there at least plans for some, oh say NVIDIA Tegra based ones?

#6

It’s been a while since the last time I’ve seen a Tegra device :wink: Are you asking about Roblox working on them (does it?) or using the full resolution?

#7

Full resolution for the 2D Guis. Roblox doesn’t look that great for a 1920 x 1200 display (NVIDIA Shield K1 tablet).
https://twitter.com/TheNexusAvenger/status/879842044893700097

#8

I just want to say, trails are awesome, thank you for them :smiley:

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#9

Well that’s one way to put it. :thinking: Otherwise I’m loving these updates. Especially trails. Good stuff! Can’t wait to see what else is in-store for us at a later point!

#10

Fair point, I reworded this.

#11

I’ll be honest, I thought this was a feature. I’d rather it be a toggle-able thing rather than completely fixed because I can think of some good uses for it.

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#12

One use case: Making so my contrails don’t disappear when I get to height where they can’t form.

799×746 144 KB

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#13

Sorry, I think I worded this poorly. That’s a feature. The initial Trail version (that’s currently live on some mobile platforms) removed all segments when you disabled & re-enabled the effect - we fixed it to just break up the trail into multiple connected pieces automatically. Updated the original post to be slightly more clear.

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#14

Ah, alright. Thanks for the clarification!

#15

If they’re similar enough, could HandleAdornments receive this same fix?

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#16

This is a different issue but I don’t see why we can’t fix HandleAdornments. Please file a bug with a repro level and we’ll take a look.

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#17

Ask and you shall receive!

http://devforum.roblox.com/t/list-of-instances-that-render-over-transparent-parts/45901

1 Like
#18

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