Skybox looks extremely degraded after changing the skybox textures a few times, affecting lighting

misternicekai · January 25, 2024, 2:29am

My experience Silly Simon Says is a minigame collection that all takes place within the same place instead of transporting players to another place for a different minigame like Epic minigames.
Going from minigame to minigame, I often have to change the skybox textures for the minigame.
i’ve noticed that after changing it a few times, the skybox has a high chance of becoming extremely degraded/pixelated.
This is how it should look:

When it becomes pixelated:

You might also notice one other thing: the lighting is affected by the skybox being degraded, as you can see when the skybox is degraded, even when it is daytime in light blue sky, the client side environment diffuse scale essentially behave as it is set to 0, with all the parts looking very dark, making surfacegui unreadable.

Here is the place that you can replicate the bug in: SKYBOX and LIGHTING PROBLEM - Roblox

I have replicated this on both a PC as well as on my iphone 13.
PC: CPU

11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-11900H @ 2.50GHz

Base speed:	2.50 GHz
Sockets:	1
Cores:	8
Logical processors:	16
Virtualisation:	Enabled
L1 cache:	640 KB
L2 cache:	10.0 MB
L3 cache:	24.0 MB

Utilisation	21%
Speed	3.91 GHz
Up time	1:22:33:24
Processes	339
Threads	6211
Handles	223278

Reproduction steps: launch the game, stay in the lobby and just wait as the minigames go on without you, currently it should happen around 2-3 minutes, but it may take longer.

Note: DOES NOT REPRODUCE in studio

Unfortunately, i have had no success replicating this bug in an empty baseplate yet. My suspicion is that it may require the game to have consumed a certain amount of client memory that cause it to degrade the skybox and thus affecting the lighting?

misternicekai · January 25, 2024, 2:57am

as a workaround, I just modified my lighting to always have environment diffuse scale set to 0 so that even if the skybox degrades, it will not affect it. Cranked up ambient + outdoor ambient brightness to compensate.

but this still doesn’t address the extremely degraded skybox

Quackback · January 25, 2024, 4:20am

Specifically, I think the client is running out of texture budget and is subsequently compressing the textures. Does this happen on mobile devices primarily?

misternicekai · January 25, 2024, 4:31am

I first noticed it on my pc starting a few months ago, and over the past week I started noticing it on my iphone 13 too.

On my pc, it happens fairly early on after spinning up a new server. memory log at developer console shows client memory at 1GB, client place memory at 330MB, client graphics texture memory at 80MB, doesn’t strike me as egregious?

Quackback · January 25, 2024, 2:21pm

Quick question, where are the other skyboxes being stored? Are they being stored on the client or server

misternicekai · January 26, 2024, 1:45am

the skybox textures are being changed on server side.

although when this happens, I would join the same server as a different user using a different device, and the skybox would look completely normal. So it does seem that whatever issue is happening it is happening on the client side.

Focia19 · March 6, 2024, 4:24pm

This is just an acknowledgment announcement!

We’ve filed a ticket into our internal database for this issue, and we will update you when we have further information!

Thanks for the report!

LightSettingsGuy · September 17, 2024, 3:15am

I’m taking a look and it seems that the place is privated. Could you send an rbxl file of the test place? Also is this issue still occuring?

misternicekai · September 18, 2024, 12:18am

hi there, my bad as this report contains two issue:

skybox become pixelated
when the above happens, the client side environment diffuse scale behave as if it is set to 0

1 still happens quite rarely (observed once on the pc client about 2 weeks ago), but there is no set way to replicate it anymore.
As for 2, I had to find a workaround, so I adjusted my scene environment diffuse scale to permanently 0 and adjusted all other lighting settings to compensate for that, so while it may still happen, it is no longer an issue for me.

In my opinion, the skybox textures should never be a target of degradation in favor of performance, since the degradation of it has a huge impact. At the very least, it needs to be set to be one of the last targets only when everything else has failed.

LightSettingsGuy · September 18, 2024, 4:40am

Ive seen reports regarding the second one but those seem to say that it isn’t happening anymore. I’m basing my opinion from interactions with Harsh Lighting in-game compared to Studio - #26 by LightSettingsGuy.

Ill figure out some about the sky degradation though. Ill try to get a repro.

LightSettingsGuy · September 18, 2024, 4:41am

Would you be able to unprivate the place SKYBOX and LIGHTING PROBLEM and send or DM an rbxl file though to repro if possible?

misternicekai · September 18, 2024, 5:06am

hi, I just dm-ed you the rbxl file.
Seeing that I’ve not touched the skybox logic since I posted the bug report, you might even have better luck reproducing it on a lower end pc on a public server of the live game (I reproduced it a few weeks ago):

The presence of other players might take up more memory and thus have a higher chance of forcing the skybox to degrade

Reditect · October 19, 2024, 3:37pm

hey, just wanted to say that I’ve reencountered the issue:

I see no errors or warnings, but the quality of Roblox’s UI is low resolution. As @misternicekai seems to note, this could be a low memory issue.

m0bsterlobster · June 17, 2025, 4:27pm

Hi misternicekai,

I saw that you hadn’t observed the skybox degradation bug a while after reporting it. Is that still the case? Looking to see whether this should still be considered an open bug. If so, could you please send me the RBLX file via a private message? I think you sent one to LightSettingsGuy but I think he may have left the company so I can’t access it.

Best,
M0bsterLobster

misternicekai · June 18, 2025, 12:52am

hello, just sent you the repro file!

m0bsterlobster · June 25, 2025, 8:26pm

Hi Misternicekai,

I joined Silly Simon Says on my iPhone 12 Pro for 10 minutes and did not observe any degradation to the Skybox texture… Are you still seeing this issue on your end? If so, I can try to reproduce on a low end Android device.

Best,
M0bsterLobster

m0bsterlobster · June 25, 2025, 8:44pm

I also just tested on a lower end Android device and couldn’t see any notable degradation after 10 minutes - could you please let me know if you’re still seeing it on your end and if so, provide info on what exact device you’re seeing it / how exactly we can reproduce it?

thank you

misternicekai · June 27, 2025, 12:46am

Hi, some additional info: I ran a poll in my discord server yesterday and out of 2k-3k members, 6 person responded and said they have seen this degradation.

I then tried to reproduce it by joining a live server on my iPad Air 2, setting my player on afk and then just let the game run for 10+ minutes.

As some minigames are happening at night where the entire skybox changes textures, after some time I did notice that the night textures are degraded. Check out the stars… especially to the left side of the screen, they are obviously degraded.

However, when the minigame ends and it switches back to the normal light blue sky, the skyboxes are not degraded.

So as for whether the issue is still present… looks like yes it is still happening. And the skyboxes are degraded when other textures are not degraded yet (see simon’s face - still looks good)

I have learnt to make this less of an issue by making the border of the clouds a lighter color, so that when it happens it is less jarring.

m0bsterlobster · June 27, 2025, 7:54pm

Got it…
Thank you tons for replying quickly and providing all the info.

I will open this ticket but realistically, given how few people are affected + how you’ve been able to work around it a bit, it will be really low priority…

I’m happy to keep it open so it maybe gets worked on in months / next year, but if you don’t think it’s a big enough issue, I’ll close it to keep our backlog tidy. Lmk how you feel - I just wanted to give you a realistic sense of priority if we leave it open.

Best,
M0bsterLobster

misternicekai · June 29, 2025, 12:53am

No worries happy to help. Afaik the lighting is no longer affected by the skybox being degraded so it is indeed less of an issue.
However I do wish to see that the skybox almost never get degraded, and only gets degraded at the very last resort (when it is obviously not the case right now), given how jarring it feels when it happens.
What about just keeping it open as a low priority issue?