ROBLOX Enables HTTP Requests from Game Servers

By Simon Kozlov - December 12, 2013

In order to surf the web, you need a web browser. The browser functions as a bridge–whenever you type in www.roblox.com (or any URL for that matter), or click on any link or picture, your browser is making something called an HTTP Request, then displaying the results of that request on your screen. As you can no doubt imagine, there are billions of these requests made daily, as a huge volume of people browse the web, download music, play ROBLOX, and read emails from all sorts of devices. It is the single most widely used communication protocol of the modern web.

Starting today, we’re allowing developers to make these very same requests from their ROBLOX game servers. We host all ROBLOX game servers in order to allow our developers and players to focus on what matters: creating and playing high-quality games. Your game’s code lives in a cloud, and can now talk with any website on the internet. In writing this sounds like a small feature. The implications of it, however, are quite large. Developers can now use services like Google Analytics to track what’s happening in their games–the number of players, the number of active servers, the percentage of returning users–all in an effort to better understand player behaviors.

ROBLOX Enables HTTP Requests from Game Servers

By Simon Kozlov - December 12, 2013

Outlines: Simple Appearance, Complex Technology

By Simon Kozlov - August 22, 2013

Last month, ROBLOX launched a new rendering feature known as “outlines.” Outlines essentially draw a black border around all the edges you see in ROBLOX worlds; helping to establish a more unified aesthetic between the vast array of creations. While they’re a work in progress and we’ve since decided to make them optional, the way we arrived at their implementation was a challenging process of considering the industry standards and developing our own solution. We ultimately settled on a technique that fits squarely within the confines of our platform and is entirely scalable to a wide range of legacy hardware.

The Extrusion Method

With the extrusion method, developers first create an extruded (slightly bigger) version of the 3D object, render it black, and place the original object on top–the resulting image creates the illusion of a black and bold frame encompassing the 3D object. This is an expensive process computationally–in order to pursue this method, we’d have to render everything twice (the object and the outline frame), which would lead to a larger pool of users with older hardware who simply couldn’t experience ROBLOX. So we took a look at…

You Can Now Toggle Outlines

By Simon Kozlov - August 13, 2013

As announced at BLOXcon London and shortly thereafter in a Comments on Comments article, we’ve decided to make the recently launched outlines feature optional for all ROBLOX builders and game developers. While we do see outlines as part of our vision for the ROBLOX aesthetic – and they do look great in many instances (see screenshot at right) – the feedback we’ve received indicates they don’t yet work everywhere. We will continue to work toward a perfect implementation but, in the meantime and with the latest version of ROBLOX Studio, you now have complete control.

Similar to dynamic lighting, toggling outlines works on two levels: you have a global “switch,” which is checked by default, for turning outlines on and off across an entire place, and fine-grain control over individual part surfaces.

Outlines: The Latest Step Toward a Unified Aesthetic

By Simon Kozlov - July 11, 2013

Many video games and software-based tools have a unified aesthetic. Not only is it visually pleasing, it’s a useful means of distinguishing a product. In ROBLOX, that unified aesthetic can go missing – while everything is built from the same set of primitives and blocks of terrain, there are stark differences in what you see from one game to the next. We want our platform to have a look that speaks to our vision and screams ROBLOX, while still scaling to a wide range of hardware and giving you complete creative freedom to express your own vision. Today, we took another step toward that goal by enabling outlines on ROBLOX parts.

Outlines are a very experimental feature and, accordingly, we’ve enabled them in a very subtle way – thin, light and drawn only in close proximity. In some cases, they’re hardly noticeable; in others, their light touch blends with dynamic lighting and our material shading for a dramatic effect. We believe, across the board, they contribute to a look that ROBLOX can call its own.

Bye Bye Bevels: The First Step Toward Our New Look

By Simon Kozlov - April 4, 2013

Last week, we notified you of some rendering changes we would be implementing in order to enhance performance while simultaneously setting the stage for our future look, which will include dynamic lighting and an updated, unified aesthetic. Today, the initial round of changes has begun. We’ve turned off bevels–they hurt performance and don’t fit our vision for the future look of ROBLOX–and shipped new rendering code that improves performance, particularly in the context of rendering static environments on slow and/or dated hardware.

Turning off bevels not only boosts performance, but also will enable us to ship dynamic lighting sooner. We’re already playing ROBLOX Battle with it turned on!

Rendering Changes and Improved Performance Are Coming Soon

By Simon Kozlov - March 27, 2013

Next week, we’ll be releasing new rendering code that will boost performance by up to 3X, enabling more people to play games that have tens of thousands of parts. Part of the performance boost will stem from turning off bevels, which round the corners of bricks. The rest will come from featherweight parts and fast parts technology applying to ROBLOX parts of all shapes, sizes and materials, and a dynamic quality adjustment sensor that automatically adjusts material quality based on your hardware. The following video demonstrates the performance differences in a place that has over a hundred thousand parts.