Several issues with the lighting engine

[WaviestBalloon]

@bloodbonniekingnoob1

first issue, which many have encountered, is light being illuminated from corners:

This is because of ambient lighting probably due to technical limitations.

@bloodbonniekingnoob1

Light are VERY laggy (especially on lower graphics)
this can be unplayable. games like doors suffer from this since not only are there visual cues, but flashlights and lighters too. this basically makes graphics under 4 unplayable since it’s awfully tedious.

Have you tried to implement Content Streaming in any way or reduce the amount of lights with performance heavy options like CastShadow?

@bloodbonniekingnoob1

Mobile lighting ALWAYS looks pretty bad no matter what graphics level you’re on. While this makes sense, it looks genuinely awful (like graphics under 4 except it’s for all graphic levels)

In RDC 23, I remember there being an announcement about Roblox bring a watered-down version of Future Lighting to mobile devices, I cannot find it anymore but there is a screenshot of it somewhere. It looked like smoothed out ShadowLighting with some reflections and shadows.
I hope this becomes it’s own lighting technology we can switch to or keep it as a update to ShadowMap because it would be nice to have smoother lighting that isn’t completely Future lighting. (Rotating lights look so clunky and jittery due to limited voxels)

@bloodbonniekingnoob1

To fix the graphics problem, they could have 2 sliders for lighting and render distance, like zfeatureharmony had:

it was genuinely a good thing, and could be simplified to be usable by anyone.

You’re going to give @xtremeguy2256 flashbacks

[bloodbonniekingnoob1 (Brutus)]

@WaviestBalloon

Have you tried to implement Content Streaming in any way or reduce the amount of lights with performance heavy options like CastShadow?

I meant as in moving a part and it takes 5 years to move

[WiggleTwis]

Speaking of lighting engine issues,

I’d like to add how ridiculous it is that rotating a part where it’s not direction 45, 90, 180 degrees makes it so light shines through blocks:

0, 45, 90, 180 Degree:

Any other angle:

This makes it impossible for me to make every tycoon in my game look the same, as they are rotated along a circle. Some are too bright, and some are too dark.

[bloodbonniekingnoob1 (Brutus)]

Thanks everyone for sharing your issues too. we’ll just have to pray to god they’ll actually do ANYTHING

[bloodbonniekingnoob1 (Brutus)]

Can we get an ETA on the next lighting update? Even if it isn’t a fix? Right now, it seems like you’re not really working on anything lighting related (I’m probably wrong, and I hope I am) and I really want to know. Or just a confirmation that you are working on something. I’m desperate.

[bloodbonniekingnoob1 (Brutus)]

@bloodbonniekingnoob1

first issue, which many have encountered, is light being illuminated from corners:

I FOUND A FIX TO THIS: put a part inside of the wall:

[bloodbonniekingnoob1 (Brutus)]

i have found another issue. Because of the fact your character’s transparency is set to 1 while you’re in first person, your shadow disappears. i had this issue for quite a while with setting body transparency to 0 but i couldn’t set the head visible for obvious reasons which lead to no head shadow.

[bluebxrrybot (blueberry)]

Your character went invisible because you are in first person. Invisible parts don’t have a shadow. This isn’t a lighting issue, it’s intentional.

[bloodbonniekingnoob1 (Brutus)]

i said that too, but i should’ve probably elaborated and said that i want invisible parts to still cast shadows lol

[bluebxrrybot (blueberry)]

You’ll notice that every game you play will look like trash if their invisible walls make a shadow.

[bloodbonniekingnoob1 (Brutus)]

castshadow off moment

[deathcharge415 (ne3ulimity)]

actually it would be really cool to have the opposite, have a shadow option for transparent parts (disabled by default). you could create some really cool illusions or whatever with it. and of course, you could fix the first person shadows (i have this issue too).

[icymanred (gengar)]

for me its the opposite, the lighting is making my character look exposed

[Rekotora3349 (Re_koFromSlovakia)]

I have it too, but it might vary on the lighting mechanic (“Compatibility”, “Future”)

[Judgy_Oreo (DisplayName)]

@bloodbonniekingnoob1

Mobile lighting ALWAYS looks pretty bad no matter what graphics level you’re on.

I hope that we see a significant improvement with lighting as a whole with the release of some of the features on the Roadmap:

(Full FiB shadows for local lights and phong shading on mobile. Just ummmm… ignore the fact that it says “Mid 2023” and it’s the 2nd of December.)

(Improved light baking times for voxels? I heard they are moving it to the GPU.)

---

A ton of these are like saying “Screen-Space Reflections (the thing used for Terrain Water reflections) are broken because they don’t reflect anything off-screen!”, like, that’s just what screen-space reflections are, “screen-space”. They are only capable of creating reflections for things that are on-screen, and getting them to not do that would be replacing SSR for a different reflection method altogether.

And a lot of this post is like that, but for the Voxel grid or performance, so;

@bloodbonniekingnoob1

light being illuminated from corners:

Is a limitation with the resolution of the voxel grid being 4x4x4. The wall is just so small that the voxels that effect it are being lit from outside it, but still bringing light in past it. Having walls be a minimum of 6 7 studs thick will fix this.

@bloodbonniekingnoob1

Light are VERY laggy

Intentionally using lower graphics quality generally means you can’t play the game on higher qualities because of low FPS, how do you know a big reason for that low FPS is not voxel grid updates? Roblox’s mentality is playability over graphics, make lower qualities as ugly as you need them to be so that, at the very minimum, tons of people can still play games on the platform.

@bloodbonniekingnoob1

Mobile lighting ALWAYS looks pretty bad no matter what graphics level you’re on.

What even is this point? “A lot of mobile devices are under-powered and can’t handle good graphics and so I’m going to push the blame onto Roblox”? Sure, it can look better, but ideally they would want to keep as much of their playerbase as possible.

[bloodbonniekingnoob1 (Brutus)]

@Judgy_Oreo

Having walls be a minimum of 6 studs thick will fix this.

i tried and it didn’t work for me

[Judgy_Oreo (DisplayName)]

Since you specifically mentioned corners, you need to make sure the walls fill the outside gap up completely:

Before:

After:

(Also, it looks like having it be 7 studs thick is the minimum instead of 6. My bad!)

[LightBeamRays]

Hello!
Thanks for sharing all those issues with us! Unfortunately, those issues are inherent to our lighting technologies and fixing them requires complex projects to modify our lighting systems. I’ll close this ticket as we are not treating it as a bug, but we’re tracking these issues as feature requests and they will be considered in our current lighting improvement efforts.

[bloodbonniekingnoob1 (Brutus)]

@LightBeamRays

but we’re tracking these issues as feature requests and they will be considered in our current lighting improvement efforts.

i really hope some of these issues will be fixed at one point in the future since lighting itself looks really beautiful and i love messing around with it. thankfully, some of these issues can be fixed with some workarounds, but still. (one thing that would be really nice is extended light ranges, i don’t get why the cap is 60 and it looks unnatural to extend via cloning lights. hopefully that is doable.)

Edit: this is why they closed the report : Enabling GrassLength in Production [Client Beta]