Ever since the release of dynamic lighting last spring, our gamers, builders and developers have united in requesting that objects blocking SpotLights and PointLights – in addition to sunlight – cast shadows. We received so many requests for this unarguably intuitive improvement that we prioritized it in our development pipeline and pushed it to production as quickly as possible. While it’s a simple advancement on the surface, the Rendering Team poured significant time into making it happen without a hit to your performance.

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You’ve probably noticed by now that the lights are on in ROBLOX Mobile. As with many significant rendering updates, getting dynamic lighting to illuminate iPhone and iPad screens was a tricky endeavor that brought our engineers face to face with some very specific technical hurdles. We got the chance to sit down with Graphics and Rendering Specialist Arseny Kapoulkine to get the scoop on porting dynamic lighting to mobile devices.

Shaders

To understand how we pulled this off, let’s start simple. Computers that can support dynamic lighting (about 97% of the computers running ROBLOX) are able to do so by utilizing shaders built into their graphics card. So our first question was, “will we be able to utilize the graphics technology bundled into iPhones and iPads to utilize shaders?” Lucky for us, iPads and iPhones 4 and higher have shader support baked in.

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Dynamic lighting has been available on ROBLOX for almost one week, meaning intrepid builders have had time to explore the depth of the feature and devise tips, tricks and techniques for harnessing its beauty. In this article, a pair of winners of our dynamic lighting video contest and a pair of builders who have demonstrated an understanding of dynamic lighting describe what they’ve learned in week one. If you’re an up-and-coming dynamic lighting aficionado, you shouldn’t miss these 100% builder-provided techniques.

We recommend you read our introduction to dynamic lighting to learn how to manipulate basic dynamic lighting variables before going deeper into this article. Here, we’ll gradually move from beginner techniques to more advanced practices. Ravenshield, one of the winners of our dynamic lighting video contest, kicks things off with a foundational consideration: the overall level of brightness in your place.

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This morning, I woke up, ate breakfast, then stepped into a ROBLOX that was different than it was yesterday. Alas, the release of dynamic lighting lead to a sudden surge of creative thoughts and ideas all throughout ROBLOX–and within less than 24 hours of the release, no less! Lights and shadows are everywhere. It’s like seeing ROBLOX through a new set of eyes. I decided to take a look around our dynamically lit platform and document my journey. Check out some of the places and things I saw.

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No more previews, contests, or prototype videos. Today, we officially flipped the switch on dynamic lighting–and we can’t wait to see what our builders do with it. Dynamic lighting is a smart voxel solution that not only lets builders control the ambient light and resulting shadows in the worlds they create, but place customizable light sources for aesthetic and gameplay purposes. Torches, flashlights, lamps–the future is a bright one. 

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After a weekend of voting and a couple days of internal deliberation, we’ve narrowed the pool of more than 200 dynamic lighting video contest submissions to the top 10. Because the quality is so high across the board, we’ve also decided to give the creators of all 10 submissions the “Master of Light and Darkness” top hat and placement on the ROBLOX YouTube channel!

Without further delay, here’s the moment you’ve been anticipating. The winners of the dynamic lighting video contest are…

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Last week, we enabled dynamic lighting on GameTest1, a testing environment for new releases of ROBLOX gameplay and ROBLOX Studio. In conjunction with the beta test, we launched a dynamic lighting video contest to see how builders leverage the much-anticipated feature – for both aesthetic and interactive purposes. We collected roughly 200 submissions, all of which are now on display on the contest website and waiting for you to show some love with your votes.

You can cast a vote for up to five entries. The voting period lasts through Monday, April 29th at 4:00 pm PT, so watch as many as you can and choose your favorites wisely. Don’t forget to leave comments of support, too.

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