With Streaming Join, Levels Load as You Play

By Yunpeng Zhu - September 11, 2013

Our Client Network Team is focused on getting players into games as quickly and efficiently as possible. Their top three goals: decrease join times, allow builders to make more complex places and creations, and offer support for all types of legacy hardware and mobile devices. The idea of real-time part streaming has been kicked around as a solution that is in keeping with our goals. Soon you will be given the option to enable streaming for your place or game via a new Studio setting. This brings about several ramifications we will discuss in this article, and ROBLOX Engineer Yunpeng Zhu will provide the details.

Pushing ROBLOX Place Data Faster Than Ever Before

By Yunpeng Zhu - March 14, 2013

Have you noticed that you’ve been jumping into ROBLOX games quicker? That’s because our networking team has been hard at work exploring ways to make our network more stable, secure, and most importantly, fast. After a ton of experimenting, we’re pleased to report that our network is the fastest it’s ever been–our data is faster and its footprint is smaller, and we’re continuing to make tweaks and enhancements. We tapped ROBLOX Software Engineer Yunpeng Zhu to tell us how we got there.

ROBLOX has sped up dramatically thanks to a couple of changes we’ve made in our networking infrastructure. A few of these changes were very simple, while some of them became extremely complex–it’s difficult to gauge how much faster ROBLOX is running because it’s not entirely dependent on networking, but the hardware users are playing on.

Interpo-what? Smoothing the Motion of Networked Objects

By Yunpeng Zhu - April 8, 2012

Dictionary.com defines “interpolate,” in mathematical terms, as inserting, estimating, or finding an intermediate term in a sequence. As dry as it sounds, it’s the reason objects are moving more smoothly in ROBLOX. Software Engineer Yunpeng Zhu is here today to explain how he improved ROBLOX’s physics interpolation, and to share some telling video evidence.

Anytime you take a video game online, there will be latency. The trick, for ROBLOX and other game developers, is to find efficient ways to manage the latency and keep players from perceiving it as lag – a freeze or slowdown in gameplay caused by a break in the flow of information between server and player.