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.
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?
I was looking forward to FIB until this post. I’m very disappointed to hear that neon’s behavior is changing in this manner. It’s hard to know how we’ll compensate our build styles without being able to mess around with this hands-on, but I’m certain we will not be enabling bloom in any of our projects. It simply doesn’t look good.
Will FIB always be opt-in, or will it replace the current lighting system once it has been fully released?
Not really. But we’ve enabled the simulation mode(new render path simulating old stuff). Nothing should look different. If it does look different, its a bug.
. But it will happen.