Hey there, blog reader! Today we're looking at a possible new feature coming to RŌBLOX by Arseny Kapoulkine as a Hack Week project "of the new lighting technology". His project introduces a possible—and, I must say, quite impressive—new look for lighting! "But what's so new anyways? What's there to improve on?" Kapoulkine stated that the new system for lightning would be much faster and easier to run for computers. Additionally, it has generally higher quality than our already impressive system. Let's get right into this.
Kapoulkine shows us that the colours are a lot more vivid and, well—colourful! As you can see, he's right! Additionally, they're a lot more realistic, too! The lights are properly spread and, if you look closely, you can find the colours mix a little bit; you can also see the colours stop merging when they pass its two neighbors. Imagine how cool games would look with these incredible hues! And the fact that these will load faster will make it better—it won't flicker for more users than ever before! If this is added, don't worry about lag.
The next thing I'd like to say is that the light becomes even more realistic here—as you can see above, there are two translucent materials: plastic (on your left) and ice (on your right). The light passing through the plastic, as one would suspect, is more blurred than that of ice, which is clearer, but it is altered in shape by the frozen water's "crunched" look. The only problem with this is that many developers are using these two materials as windows, and, as mentioned by Kapoulkine himself, they do not have a glass material yet—I suppose we'll have to wait, as he says, "one thing at a time".
This next part is my favourite; we've been so focussed on the actual light, we've forgotten to look at what happens when there's none, or less!—we're look at improvements to shadows. One of the best parts is that unions act properly in terms of shadows now—as if unions could never get better (cough, cough)! This also, according to Kapoulkine, works with mesh parts, which is a relatively new component to Studio and the games we have today. On your right, youcan see this. Moving on, we see some more impressive shadows at work with everyday parts and their available non-mesh shapes. It looks so good, one might mistaken it for a edited picture! Equally stunning, shadow positions and sizes change depending on the time property in the Lighting instance. Watch the video here and skip to seven minutes and fifteen seconds (7:15) to see shadows change over time as it turns from day to night. Shadows can also be seen from a farther distance from distant objects, as well as small objects that would not cast as high-quality shadows as we see in his demo! It's limit? Zero point two studs, which, by the way, is not possible to size lower than without meshes. The photo underneath this text displays an accurate shadow of a distant tree and Kapoulkine's default avatar. There are also some more photos of accurate shadows—they're beautiful!
Overall, this Hack Week project deserves praise and glory. Thank you, Arseny Kapoulkine, for this amazing, exciting, intelligent, and intriguing Hack Week project—you deserve to shine (okay, okay, I'm sorry!). You can watch Kapoulkine's video, ROBLOX: Future Is Bright, here:
