The ability to force parts to render

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.

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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!)

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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.

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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.

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Bumping this, it’s been almost 6 years - why can’t we reliably render distant parts? This isn’t a streaming problem - the parts exist on the client, they just don’t render.

So much of designing an easy to navigate map relies on being able to see distant landmarks. This use case is never going to go away.

Please, we need a solution to exclude certain parts / models from the lower setting graphics culling. It doesn’t matter how much streaming allows for larger maps if you can’t be sure your players will be able to see it.

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I WANT THIS! This should be reintroduced back into Roblox, some settings at higher levels cannot be disabled, Anti-Aliasing is very performance heaving and so is ambient occlusion, I should be able to disable those so that I can bump up the settings I actually need without the need of a new computer.

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I wish that most of the settings actually would have worked, when I tested it a lot of settings actually didn’t do anything. But yeah I get what you mean, if they were a bit less settings in zfeatureharmony and they were more generalised like:
-Ambient Occlusion
-Reflections
-Texture Quallty
-Post Processing Quality
-Effects quality (particles etc)
-Shadows Quality (mainly only for future)

Since a lot of the settings in zfeatureharmony were kind of confusing and wouldn’t be understood well by the majority of Roblox’s audience. So yea I agree with you a lot

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Bump, stop ignoring this roblox, its been 7 years.

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It’s been a year, where is this feature roblox.

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it’s been 7 years roblox has DEFINITELY seen this, STOP IGNORING IT PLEASE

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remember kids, the same people at roblox who say “if we make parts force to render then it would be too complicated for 7 year old developer timmy!” are the same people who say “let’s add creepy facial animation to our game! what could possibly go wrong?”

surely this can’t be that difficult to add. we NEED more fine-tuning of things like this for our games. stop underestimating developers (and children for that matter) and what they can do. we’re not just a bunch of stupid idiots.

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Bump, something like this is NEEDED! Giving the control to the developer is what makes a engine good to great.

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Bump, i need this as well, please do something

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Those can be done with OpenGL, its just laziness on roblox’s part
Half-Life 2 runs on DX9 on Windows and GL 2.1 on Linux (Roblox uses 3.2) and looks amazing

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I’m not talking about OpenGL for desktops, I’m talking about OpenGL ES 2 in particular, I should have clarified that. Although a engineer has told me that this isn’t directly the issue here, rather its a far more complex set of issues that all contribute to this not being added yet.

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This feature is very important to the immersion of my game. I have been developing a “LiDar” system that only renders very small circular parts to represent the enviroment; parts that are not rendered when the player is even a short distance away. I have spent a lot of time on optimization and understand the risks, it’s a little frustrating that we don’t have basic control over simply rendering parts.

If you're curious, here is my forum post.

Is There a Way to Remove Rendering “Box” or Expand Its Distance? - Help and Feedback / Scripting Support - Developer Forum | Roblox

I think it’s unlikely this will be added (considering the original post was made in 2017) but if it were, this would be an absolutely vital feature, one that arguably should already be implemented.

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Lord knows that seven years isn’t apparently enough time for a feature like this. Bump. This would be extremely useful to maintain instances/elements crucial for environmental immersion but are too big or far to comply with the current system. I fear a map I’m working on for my game will suffer from this so I sincerely wish something like this gets implemented eventually.

iirc Highlights can force parts to render even if disabled but it should be obvious why this is a horrendous solution. Please add this roblox I beg.

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Bump again, roblox has to be ignoring this on purpose because they’re lazy

I think having more control over graphics in general would be very good.
Both in-game and in-studio.

Some graphics and effects in Roblox still require quite hacky workarounds or you have to actively fight the engine itself to get something done.

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roblox make it happen this should have been a feature 7 years ago. It’s actually really annoying that this isn’t a thing already.