ROBLOX released its high-performance terrain feature late in 2011, allowing users to create and play games significantly larger than anything previously seen on the platform. Many ROBLOX users have since taken advantage of terrain, particularly to facilitate expansive games with fast vehicles. Currently, the ROBLOX Content Team is pushing the feature further than ever before with a new game that procedurally generates destructible, cliff- and gold-ridden terrain each round (we’ll have more on that soon).

Terrain can be up to 2048 x 256 x 2048 studs in dimension, containing up to 16 million 4 x 4 x 4 terrain cells, with no graphics slow-down. One of the supporting techniques we use to make terrain so scalable and efficient is Run Length Encoding. Run Length Encoding makes the file sizes of terrain places a small fraction of what it would be with normal parts.

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