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:
It’s been like this since late 2022, which is weird, roblox should revert this change and make items with effects actually show their effects properly, it’s just so annoying…
Update: This seems to be slowly being fixed, gear by gear. Happy to see this is being reverted, honestly couldn’t stand the “new and improved” look of these items
Update; Nevermind. A couple hours ago the render seemed to have changed but it’s gone back now. The example I was going to link was Spec Alpha Biograft Energy Sword - Roblox
Hopefully they’re testing a permanent fix for this fingers crossed
Can confirm the particles are now transparent once again!
While this is being looked at, could we get an update on particles lacking color on the website renderer? Particles including (but not limited to) sparkles & fire lack color and have a different appearance in app vs on web.
This affects both avatars & items and can be misleading to the average user. Take Spring Fairy as an example- the particles appear white on the website, but in-game they’re a shade of pink-purple.
More expensive items like Fiery Horns of the Netherworld are also affected by this issue, showing white flames on the website, but actually being a bright orange in-game.
This completely ruins gear with effects, because it literally lacks the effects shown in your character’s thumbnail, I really wish Roblox fixed this one day.
Yeah I don’t think they completely fixed this issue they just reverted the update that made all effects look like . Hopefully they put more effort into it
I unfortunately don’t think this will happen any time soon as an Engineer mentioned that this is a byproduct of them switching from black to white backgrounds.
p.s - If anyone could find that reply for me, that’d be awesome
Look, I’m sure they had a very good reason to switch the background used for thumbnail rendering - but they should prioritize fixing the side effects. This has been broken for almost 2 years now and affects hundreds of the most popular items they sell.
It’s possible to make the renders look good again! In fact, I recently encountered a bug on mobile where the circular Avatar Headshot render unintentionally rendered a gear my character was holding (usually the circular headshot render omits gears to focus on the face). The funny thing was, with this accidental render on mobile, the particles showed with full color and the lighting also seemed to look better! I wish I’d taken a screenshot.
EDIT: also interesting to note that the comment I linked to states that the background change happened ~7 years ago? but the transparent color issue only popped up around 2022 iirc.
I believe they should revert back to black backgrounds, as white backgrounds seem to have only caused problems (from what I’ve seen, atleast. I’m not very well-versed in this so I have no idea what benefit white backgrounds have).
Edit: I checked the Roblox fandom (yes, I know, bad place to get information) to see when the thumbnails of items that have particle effects that have the color issue were uploaded, and I found Hiccup’s Improved Helmet uploaded in 2017, and The Ice Skull of Nevermoor uploaded in 2016, so it seems this issue started way back.
. Hopefully they put more effort into it
