This looks great, good to see some big changes are starting to roll out!
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We won’t have black neon anymore. We know that it is used a lot, but it is not completely crucial feature. On one hand you won’t have black glow, but on the other you can modulate per part intensity by changing color.
Also future is bright will be opt in feature.
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Yes, You got it right. I’ve used your version to make it more clear. Thanks
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This is a very reasonable concern. With the Future is Bright, we’re moving from a low dynamic range where everything has a brightness value between 0 and 1 to a high dynamic range where things can be however bright you want. In the demo video, the brightest neon parts show up on-screen with somewhere between 1 and 3 brightness, while the rest of the scene (the base plate and even the skybox) have values less than 1. So this expanded range of brightness should give you good control over what parts of your scene receive blur based on the Threshold you set on your BloomEffect instance.
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While the shown content of The Future is Bright is amazing, I do think that this tradeoff appears mostly as a downgrade, at least compared to what we can do now.
The pros with this update, as I see it:
- Low-end devices can see neon / bloom
- Transparent parts can have adjusted neon intensity
However, the cons:
- Developers lose control and can no longer keep neon on while disallowing bloom. Like other people have expressed in this post, global bloom is not always something people want when working with neon bricks.
- No more dark neon support - this limits the aesthetics for some genres of games
- There seems to be a sudden flip from neon to no neon, as shown in ConvexRumbler’s video - the 1/4th of the tiles near the camera have no neon intensity, which seems to appear suddenly instead of gradually.
We can already adjust the intensity of materials such as neon to some degree, although only for opaque parts, as seen here: Material Sharpness / Transparency - #3 by As8D
My biggest problem with this update is the discontinuation of dark color neon, as well as the inability to disable bloom while keeping neon on, although my biggest joy with this update is that low-end devices can get to experience neon, making it more accessible to everyone.
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I agree with berezaa. There are many use cases where a developer would want neon without adding bloom throughout the world. For exmaple, say I have a sci-fi gun. I have some neon on the scifi gun, and the bullets are neon (to look like lasers or plasma). I want to be able to do this with the gun without spamming bloom all over the world.
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I feel that the cons of this outweigh the pros in terms of creativity. Bloom is too intense in my opinion and having it correlate with neon intensity seems like it’d be a nightmare 
.
Maybe people can do something cool with it, though.
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I don’t use bloom at all but I use neon lots in my game(The Conquerors 3). I even have a neon teamcolor gamepass that makes all the teamcolor sections of a player’s units/buildings neon. It would be a shame to lose that without having bloom on the rest of the world. Unless I misunderstand completely.
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That… sucks. I don’t really know what else to say. There’s a lot of things that can be considered “not completely crucial.” It’s the little things that make games awesome, and it sucks losing this one
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Please find a way keep black neon. I’ve been using it to make caves and other dark entrances, and it looks so much better than the old method of using 47 transparent parts to achieve the same effect.
Also, I dislike the idea of being forced to have some sort of bloom in order for neon to work correctly. I’d rather have no bloom and just neon.
I understand how much work is going into FIB and I’m greatly thankful for all you guys have done to get it to be a thing, but this would really harm the look and feel of many games.
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A plugin that can control the Rendering settings in Studio, I suppose.
Yep, made by TheNexusAvenger, you can install it here:
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Cool, I’m definitely installing that
Thanks for a great feedback.
Seems like that there are two concerns black neon and coupling the bloom and neon.
Black Neon:
It was always a sort of hack and a byproduct of the way the neon was implemented. Roblox is moving towards more physically correct rendering and there is no black light in real world. Basically the equation of adding bloom&neon changed from “alpha blend” to “addition”. The implementation in FIB is more physically correct and makes sense in HDR pipeline. Whole (rendering) team in in board of retiring the black neon. I dont think that we are going to change our minds on this. Sorry about it. It sucks to limit your creativity with what is supposed to unleash it, however there are trade offs and this is just a small part of big update of shipping the whole FIB. We really thought about this.
Please note: We’ve been telling you to not rely on the black neon for a while now (for example here: Introducing: Improved Neon)
Coupling neon&bloom:
This update makes sense too in a big picture of making everything more physically correct. Now our frame buffer allows to accumulate HDR (even on the crappiest, slowest smart phones) and we later resolve this using tonemapper into LDR and display it in the screen. There is a big difference between behavior of bloom in LDR environment and in HDR. The bloom threshold is now between [0.8; 4.0] and if you set the bloom threshold slightly over 1, you won’t get any crazy sky glow, while you have neon glowing. You will get glow on parts that are lit by lights with a big intensity too.
New parameter exposure compensation can make overall scene to be brighter or darker, also causing it to bloom more or less. There will be auto exposure like in the full FIB builds later.
New sky is also on the road map. This should work better with the HDR rendering too.
We hope that these changes will actually work in your favor and you will like it once you try it.
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I trust that you guys have made the right call here in the grand scheme of things. I’m looking forward to seeing what FIB is going to bring :)!
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Will we be able to control the rate at which auto exposure corrects?
Really excited for this! Any idea when it’ll be releasing?
Will we be able to control the rate at which auto exposure corrects?
Right now you can do the offset. I think the rate would make sense to have. Can’t promise that right now. But we will, of course, try to make it as useful as we can 
Really excited for this! Any idea when it’ll be releasing?
No promises 
. But it will happen.
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