The image quality will not be lossless. We will be exploring how much of an effect this will have. Based on this there is a decision to be made to give developers the ability to override.
I don’t follow your concern around LOD for meshes. The product cases for images vs meshes seem different. In image quality the distance to camera doesn’t matter but in LOD it does. How will having a far away car be of lower detail affect your game negatively?
Hard to say without knowing specifics of how mesh LOD will be implemented, but I could imagine issues with objects that aren’t small at a distance. At 1000 studs away, a car is small and the difference in detail won’t be very noticeable. At 1000 studs away, a planet/space station are still pretty large, and any changes are going to be much more noticeable.
If we can’t override, then I’d rather the image compression only apply to mobile devices. On the big screen, I’d rather have unabridged access to my images. I’m worried about the lossy compression introducing artifacts on natively sized images.
Right now, Roblox images are fuzzy unless they are displayed at the image’s natural resolution. It would be a shame for developers to lose the ability to create crisp images at their natural size as well due to the image itself just being of low quality.
In my game, I always try to upload images at the size I’m going to be displaying them at so that I can have them as crisp as possible. It’s a night and day difference for me, especially on pure white UI icons. It’s important to me that I can continue to display high quality icons in my game after this update.
You can actually take the CSS file with data-target="desktop" and apply it to the developer forums. The link to the file doesn’t stay updated with Discourse updates, though, and sometimes the CSS file link becomes dead on Discource updates, so using it on the developer forums is a pain (but looks nice!)
For the short time I messed with my own discourse site, I can confirm Discourse has a built in dark theme. It would need tuning though. The blue logo might have to be replaced with a white on on the dark theme, along with a bunch of other things.
I am worried about the LOD for meshs in terms of quality. All developers have to compare when we hear Roblox saying LOD, is the current LOD of terrain.
Will mesh LOD be optional or in anyway customizable, such as a number sequence for “camera distance” and “%LOD”?
Roblox Titanic would be significantly negatively impacted by LOD of meshs if it the quality is similar to the terrain LOD. I’m not trying to say that LOD will never be able to help, however I maintain my question from my first paragraph.
Here is a shot at the new ship from~1400 studs away and FOV 20. This new ship model is 95%+ highly optimized mesh parts by inyo22 and mistertitanic44, going into live game soon. Players with a gamepass can fly around and change their FOV, so being far away, then zooming in the FOV, which doesn’t change the camera distance, would magnify the low detail meshs in a negative viewing pleasure way. Here’s current:
If the mesh LOD is any way similar to the terrain LOD, all I can picture the ship being from this far away is a blob and that would be an extremely sad day for Roblox.
This is why we have Camera.Focus – so that you can tell Roblox’s LOD systems where the action is. Most of Roblox’s LOD systems use it instead of the camera’s position.
Off the top of my head, VFX (emitters/trails/beams) are some of the few things that don’t (not sure if this is intended though; if it is, maybe the wiki page should say what all uses it? @zeuxcg@Maximum_ADHD)
As I mentioned before, we’ll likely have something like CollisionFidelity for this - an enum which would allow you to control and/or disable LOD. Mesh LOD can also be more precise that terrain LOD - terrain LOD uses a voxel-based simplification which is absolutely crucial as we can’t precompute much with terrain, whereas mesh LOD would be able to preserve appearance better.
We currently don’t take field of view into account when doing LOD for anything; this hasn’t been a frequent ask. I hear there’s a pipeline to request things like this through though
This just popped up in my settings menu mmmmmmmmmmmm
Edit: It seems that no one else I’ve talked to has gotten this yet, and the icons don’t seem to have changed (which I assume they will once this feature is done, the icons currently used look terrible with a dark theme). I don’t suppose I’m supposed to have this setting yet?