Future Is Bright

Future Is Bright is a lighting system introducing HDR rendering, shadow mapping and PBR model implementation. Future Is Bright is the successor to the old system introduced by the dynamic lighting update.
Future Is Bright development was split into 4 phases: phase 1 which introduces the lighting system itself, phase 2 which introduces shadow mapping for directional light only, phase 2.5 which introduces PBR model implementation and phase 3 which extends shadow mapping to local lights.
==Phase 1 - Technology.Voxel==
On October 13, 2018, rendering engineer zeuxcg announced the studio beta release of the first phase of the Future is Bright project. The main goals of this phase were to essentially bring things into line with the features Roblox needed in order to be able to model real-world visuals - HDR rendering, linear-space lighting, anisotropic occupancy, and a tonemapper. Low-quality bloom has also been implemented, resulting in a very low-resolution bloom effect appearing on lower quality levels, which looks rather pixely and choppy. 
The Lighting.ExposureCompensation property was also introduced alongside this, allowing you to adjust the HDR behaviour to your liking.
The project was enabled on the Roblox Player client on December 3, 2018, and was welcomed with generally positive feedback on the Developer Forum at the time.
==Phase 2 - Technology.ShadowMap==
On March 27, 2019, Roblox released Technology.Compatibility, with the intent of loosely approximating the basic behaviour of Legacy lighting, without having to make substantial changes within their engine code to allow it to be supported longer-term. Lighting.Legacy was removed from Roblox on June 27, 2019, but remained available through FastFlag changes until late September 2019.
On April 18, 2019, Roblox launched a Studio beta of Lighting.ShadowMap, replacing external voxelised sun shadows with sharper, higher-resolution ones that were formed on the principle of cascading shadow-maps. This update also introduced the ShadowSoftness setting (exclusive to Lighting.ShadowMap & later Lighting.Future), which allows developers to adjust the appearance of the edges of the shadows to be softer or sharper in their games. 
s also received a new property called CastShadow, which allows a developer to toggle shadows for an object on or off. Although this feature accompanied the release of Lighting.ShadowMap, it is fully functional in all other Lighting.Technology settings. The distance at which shadow-mapping appears also depends on the user's quality level; for quality levels below 4, Roblox will fall back to the traditional 4^3 voxelised shadows. 
On May 11, 2019, Lighting.ShadowMap was officially released to the Roblox Player client.
==Phase 2.5==
On December 4th, 2019, the appearance of the built-in materials changed as a result of the switch from a specular-based rendering workflow to one that is based upon the use of physically based rendering (PBR). This change has divided users, and results in many objects (older meshes) looking downgraded or even horrendous compared to before - it did however allow for the addition of EnvironmentalSpecularScale and EnvironmentalDiffuseScale to the lighting properties in Roblox Studio, just over a month later. The previous specular rendering remained accessible through changes to FFlag configuration settings, until January 31, 2020.
On January 22, 2020, the Lighting.EnvironmentDiffuseScale and Lighting.EnvironmentSpecularScale properties were officially released, though had been hidden and accessible by the command bar since December 2019. They two properties improve the visual properties of certain materials, particularly on metallic objects, and allow for games to more accurately model real-world visuals.
==Phase 3 - Technology.Future==
On June 24, 2020, Roblox officially announced the Studio beta for the third and final phase of the Future is Bright lighting update. Building on Lighting.ShadowMap, Lighting.Future took the new shadow-mapping technology and combined it with per-pixel lighting from local light sources (PointLight, SpotLight and SurfaceLight objects) in order to create a lighting mode that aims to achieve real world-accurate lighting behaviour where possible. For performance reasons, it falls back to voxelised lighting on quality levels 3 and below.
On November 24th 2020, after a long beta period, Lighting.Future was finally released to the Roblox Player client, bringing major Future is Bright development work to a close.
Category:Experience features