The Roblox development team has been doing an exceptional job with the past few year's work on improving the Roblox engine and its graphical capabilities. Dynamic lighting, new materials, new reflections, and more are major steps forward to bring Roblox into the modern game engine era.
However, there are still a few more things that can be done to increase Roblox's visual fidelity. Note that all of the things that I am about to suggest, I am suggesting as OPTIONAL improvements, so that older computers or people who simply don't like these effects would NOT have to run them.
Many of these suggestions, if not all of them, are post-process effects, meaning they are definitely capable of running as purely optional effects on top of the current rendering engine.
Here are my suggestions:
-Bloom
Bloom is featured in nearly every modern game engine. It's an easy effect to achieve (fade bright pixels into the surrounding darker pixels), and it provides a nice-looking soft glow around bright objects, not unlike what your eyes would see in real life. This would make SurfaceGuis in particular much more realistic, as screens would have a small glow to them.
(If you are interested in seeing what these effects look like, google search them, as I am not allowed to post external links)
-Motion Blur
In many game engines, when you move your camera quickly, the screen will slightly blur as you move. This mimics real life, in which you can't see completely clearly when you are looking around really fast.
-Bump Maps for Textures (or at least Materials)
Bump maps, although graphically taxing, are an amazing visual effect. Notice how, when you make a part on Roblox with the bricks material, it doesn't look entirely like bricks. In fact, it looks quite flat. Bump maps displace textures so that they look 3-D. With bump maps, the bricks texture would look like actual, real life bricks, instead of a picture of bricks on a wall.
-Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering
If I'm not mistaken, these features already exist in Roblox, yet the option to turn them on is too hidden for most players to notice. These effects make games look significantly better by blurring distant edges and sharpening distant textures.
That's all the suggestions for rendering that I have so far. These basic filters are what make most game engines look... like game engines. I think that Roblox could definitely benefit from them. |