My game, Nerf FPS has been compatible with Xbox for years, but I started seeing a massive player count drop quite a few months ago around the time ShadowMap lighting became a thing. I didn’t really look into it much until now when I got an actual OG Xbox One to test my game with. When I booted up my game it ran like utter trash, it was averaging like 20 FPS in any scenario.
So I started to investigate different settings to see what was causing the issue. Changing it from the Future/ShadowMap lighting to Voxel or Compatibility was the only method to solve this issue. Once I was running in Voxel or Compatibility lighting, it was running a smooth 60 FPS all the time, very consistently. So then I tried to change the lighting technology specifically for Xbox players, but that property can’t be scripted, at all.
So now I have to decide whether or not to revert the lighting technology for ALL players or just leave Xbox players out in the dust. This is a very hard decision since I used to have over 1,000 concurrent players on Xbox, but now I only average around 10.
Any chance that this could be fixed? I’m not asking for Lighting.Technology to be scriptable, just better performance or graphics options on Xbox. Arsenal and a lot of other games that have ShadowMap/Future lighting have this same issue.
This really isn’t a big, this is just how expensive those 2 technologies are. This is why majority of the front page games avoid such expensive technologies sun order to support mobile and console, very few games benefit from these technologies (I can only imagine PC only games). One solution could be having the ability to detect the device a user is on and change the technology at runtime (I’m sure if Roblox allows for that).
I’m investigating it further and it just seems like the OG Xbox One just runs horribly on Roblox just in general. Xbox One X players are running it just fine it seems?
There are a few that do but it’s safe to say majority of the front page games don’t. The only ones I know from the top of my head are possibly Phantom Forces, Grand Piece Online, Arsenal.
Regarding the issue, there isn’t much that can be done unless Roblox plans to manually optimize it in sacrifice of detail. Also I just saw what you said, perhaps that Xbox device is just low-end. FIB3 recently got released and there were multiple topics talking about how the quality got “down graded”, it seems like Roblox already tried making changes during this phase.
I’ll leave it at that, if you wish to discuss more about this feel free to private message me.
You cannot script the lighting technology property, but you can script CastShadow on parts. I don’t know what your levels look like, but I assume you could get away with disabling CastShadow on most of the parts in your game for Xbox specifically. Maybe keep CastShadow on large walls and facades but disable it on bits of grass, smaller obstacles like crates, barrels, et cetera.
If you desire to keep ShadowMap on all other supported devices but switch Xbox to Voxel/Compatibility, unfortunately your best bet is to have xbox on a completely different place. Undesired, as I do agree Roblox should allow some form of device and environment adjustment before a game loads, it would be the only “solution”. Unfortunately, it’ll also prevent xbox players from being able to integrate with your other players, which can be a problem.
Seeing how Datastores can be a pain to manage, your best bet would be to make the Xbox game a “sub-place” of the current game and keep the current place the main place. Using some logic (it’s possible, I’ll get an example here in a bit), you can determine if someone is on console and teleport them to the Xbox specific place without having to deal with transferring data/etc.