Sparkles broke (even more) today which makes them appear not transparent when equipped, here is an example using Sparkle Time Lump of Coal - Roblox.
Above shows the sparkles are normal.
But here, they dont have any transparency, unless they are in front of my character, which happened before to a lesser degree. It used to not show any color unless the particles were in front of your character, which I will be showing using an old render using the Amethyst Periastron Kappa - Roblox.
Expected behavior
Sparkles should be fixed and be brought to their original state and maybe have this previous color glitch fixed too.
I really hope that they are trying to tweak this to the communities approval, as there has been multiple detailed reports detailing how particle effects and transparent items should be fixed, not only on the avatar editor but on their respective thumbnails aswell.
I don’t think the community wants the render of sparkles, flames or any other sort of particle effects to change; They just want them to render properly, or atleast how they used to render.
This may be a product of Roblox updating the system they use to render thumbnails I highly doubt this is a permanent or intentional issue, as it only appears to affect thumbnails currently. Regardless now particles and effects look absolutely terrible and dull.
The Blade of the Dusekkar has to be one of the best examples of this change; From having vibrant, swirling flames encasing the blade to a faint, distant glow that’s barely noticeable.
Yea I just realized on some gears the particle doesn’t even show up at all. For example the evil knight sword had smoke particles but now nothing, this might be a bigger problem than I thought.
Happens for most if not all particle items. Issue is much more prominent on thumbnails that include sparkles like periastrons or seasonal fairies (e.g. Fall Fairy, Spring Fairy).
On top of this, there are issues surrounding particles in general - many particles won’t even render unless if it’s in front of an opaque surface.
Particles also lack color when not in front of surfaces like these. You can see in my other post here - Amethyst Periastron Kappa’s particles (purple) only have color when they overlap my body.
Would like to add that a significant part of the value of many Limited gear items are the appearance of the particles on your avatar’s render (for which the only real functionality these days is as a prop that appears on your rendered profile image, as little to no games actually enable gear use these days, and most of them don’t properly function anymore). I think it’s a bit unfortunate that the appearance of particles and transparent items in general within renders has been getting progressively worse since they originally became broken in July 2022.
Quick example of both a transparent accessory and a particle item before and after the behavior change in July 2022:
