Huge necro bump here, hopefully not an issue - was about to post my own thread. My idea was going to be a property called “ForceRendered”, or something along those lines.
There are a lot of use cases where long distance parts need to be rendered, either for gameplay purposes, or for scenery.
Bumping this again, this is something that needs being implemented, We should be able to force render some specific parts no matter the graphics setting
Bumping this once again, I’m trying to make a large area at the beginning of my game that shows stuff at a distance that gives a grandiose type of feel, however as of right now this is completely impossible. Even using the new LOD feature just makes giant blobs in the distance that are supposed to be mountains. Roblox has been doing a lot of changes to StreamingEnabled now PLEASE allow us to choose objects we want to render regardless as this is pointlessly limiting to developer creativity as of right now.
I ran into this issue many times:
At the end of the day, is not like you will spam your game with parts rendering all the time, but is needed for things like I mentioned.
Did they ever implement something to fight this? Embarrassing if not
This was very easily doable at one point, roblox had a branch called zfeatureharmony. This was abandoned as of 2022 for unknown reasons. In this branch of roblox you were able to change individual bits of the graphics settings available in the engine. Instead of having 1 slider for all settings.
StreamingEnabled update that is coming out soon will help I believe.
Haven’t heard of this, can you provide more info or a source?
I’ve been meaning to implement that into my game anyways, so if I can kill 2 birds with 1 stone that’d be amazing. Though it’s important to remember that I’m talking about graphics rendering out, not being streamed out - there is a difference
I’ve been begging roblox for settings for years. The technical head told me they “wouldn’t be used much” by the children players of roblox, therefore we were never getting them… Was a cruel joke of a response.
It’d be cool to see something like that. For my project, I intend to have skyscrapers at a distance. Thinking about how gta 4’s skyline how there isn’t a load of things rendered with details until you get closer (see image below). Yes they have the basic shapes of the skyscrapers but they don’t have like the more in detail building textures compared to going up close.
Maybe for kids it’ll be complicated, which is a thing Roblox can think about on how they can make something like that work. Possibly, it can be added for users 13+ since the players around that age range can handle how they want their game rendered. <13 users aren’t going to care as much about render as to them, it’s just another game to play and mess around in.
In conclusion, it’d be cool to see this implemented in the future. Considering that it would look great on visuals for games with larger maps.
This, is the exact response you can expect to receive on any request regarding visual fidelity & control over its performance load.
They simply refuse to accept the fact that we want visual fidelity and control for the sake of our games running better, looking better and being more accessible for lower end if we would be able to control more lower level functionality of the engine!
A good example being, why does Roblox have no shaders, no advanced lighting and so on?
The answer being very likely OpenGL. Which is at this point so old and slow, being used by such a small amount of mobile users and almost NO desktop users at all.
Every other engine has deprecated OpenGL in favor of Vulkan (Atleast on desktop) which is far more faster and allows for more visual features. But even then, mobile versions of engines (such as unity mobile or unreal mobile) still offer support for OpenGL, albeit those versions still offer far more features than what Roblox will likely ever give to us.
Put short, Roblox for the most part don’t care about requests regarding fidelity and control. They always want to justify either not adding features to begin with or then make such features be completely automated, look as terrible as possible (so that the 1% can still run it.) and uncontrollable (envmaps are good example. I have no idea how they thought that its a good idea to have them being randomly generated during runtime). The engine has so much potential but its simply being pushed away.
I have honestly given up trying to get any sort of response from Staff or Engine Developers.
Streaming is not a good solution. Its still automated and we still cannot manually replicate instances.
We need manual control. Streaming being automated does not suit for most games.
OpenGL vs Vulkan is mostly irrelevant in this discussion as we are not making AAA games in roblox.
The problem is that higher ups in roblox corp belive in the nft and metaverse scam.
The people that would say ‘no’ to shaders at roblox corp are the same people that want phone calls and face tracking in roblox.
I don’t know where the exact clip at RDC I was talking about is now, but this one talks about the same thing pretty much. https://youtu.be/CcDHFmOGYyY?t=179 Timestamp 3:14.
Trust me, if you would want to compile a shader for DirectX11 and OpenGL ES 3. These two dont mix well together.
What makes me slightly more upset about this is that, Dev Relations staff genuinely reply to a ton of stuff on the forum, but you do see a massive deadzone in certain threads. Threads like this are posted and active for literal years but don’t receive any good replies.
Dev Rel I think needs to be a little bit more honest on addressing things that have been concerns for literal years, surely? Perhaps we need to learn to start pinging them. They have a role in the forum but it does not seem to be ping-able or anything, despite them basically being the forefront of who we can communicate with. Such an honest, but lacking, attempt they give.
This is a weird reply, as roblox pushes the graphical fidelity up every year, and there are multiple examples of both:
A. People making millions of dollars on roblox games (Sometimes single games)
and
B. People making games that push roblox’s graphics to the very limit, and compete with more modern titles in fidelity.
“We are not making AAA games in Roblox” is a factually inaccurate, surely?
Perhaps we aren’t making a lot of them, but we are, and roblox does recognize that, though they have a very difficult thing to balance between performance on low-end platforms and graphical fidelity. (They certainly aren’t doing a great job, however, at that!)
Genuinely an embarrassing opinion and truly disappointing to hear, kids play more advanced games than their parents even know about. Roblox needs to stop treating them like they’re idiots. They can figure out that e.g. turning down particles increases performance without completely obliterating the look and feel of an immersive game. They can turn up render distance but keep everything else low quality in games where it really matters.
The worst part is it comes straight from the top. Roblox’s technical director got into a twitter argument with me years ago where he claimed “Almost nobody would use advanced settings” while presenting a whopping 0 argument for it, while claiming /I/ was the one who wasn’t willing to have an “intelligent conversation” and leaving.
When I asked about Anti-Aliasing as a setting he just said “Change your quality level” lmao, because it’s considered normal to change every single setting just to adjust anti-aliasing.
Not sure if Zeuxcg is still the technical director, or what his current opinion is, but I sure hope he’ll learn to respect the community one day.
Roblox literally allows for 18+ M-RATED games now.
Every. Single. Person. Above the age of 18, knows how to use these ‘advanced graphical settings’.
But yet, somehow, I get the feeling their opinion on how many people would use settings is the same as it always was.
On a side note, it’s funny you mention specifically particles and render distance, because I have a game that benefits from high render distance, and has a lot of particles, while also occasionally causing players to crash due to roblox’s infinite particle persistence “issue” they refuse to acknowledge.
