Having the option would be nice. We lack a lot of visual decisions as it is, and more options is always nice. Dunno how having it always on would be beneficial.
Neon’s a really useful material- one of the few that has a cool unique effect. Being able to customize that would be pretty handy; I’m personally not a huge fan of bloom, but love neon.
There seems to be some confusion in this thread so I wanted to clear up some of the behavior this change has (from what I’ve observed, not sure if this is 100% accurate).
Currently Roblox does not enable the Bloom effect unless you explicity have a BloomEffect in the Lighting. The FIB version won’t show it by default either. Instead it appears to be influenced by a new property in the Lighting called ExposureCompensation.
Roblox is not forcing bloom to be enabled in the skybox. It will just lurk around by default when you enable FIB lighting, and whether it is shown depends on the ExposureCompensation of the scene.
@Younite With the proposed behavior, the blur intensity is proportional to the Part’s brightness. So if you make a white neon part, the halo will be bigger than that of a grey neon part.
The current system operates in a low dynamic range, where everything has a brightness between 0 and 1. We currently blur all pixels on the screen that satisfy these conditions:
A pixel is marked as “neon”
A pixel has some brightness above a threshold IF there’s a BloomEffect present
In the system being proposed, there is no more condition 1. We’d like to stop marking pixels as “neon” for some technical reasons. Only pixels satisfying condition 2 would receive blur. This is a trade off because you’ll no longer be able to make black neon parts glow. However, there are several upsides to this.
This will give you control over the size and intensity of the halo around neon parts via the brightness of the Part’s color and the Size and Intensity parameters on your BloomEffect instance.
Neon will work with the camera’s exposure property we plan to release. If you look directly at a bright light in real life, you’ll see a halo around it. If you look at the same light wearing sunglasses, the halo will disappear and you’ll be able to see the light clearly. With the proposed system in Roblox, turning down camera exposure will have the same effect.
If our engine no longer has to mark pixels as “neon”, we’ll have less limitations when exploring improving image quality and implementing new effects.
It’s unfortunate there’s not a way to make black neon parts glow under this system. We think the benefits of the new system outweigh the lack of support for this use-case, but we want to hear your feedback.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.