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.
Graphics gurus Simon Kozlov and Arseny Kapoulkine have been hard at work prototyping a ROBLOX lighting system that uses voxels to create dynamic shadows and lights that can be placed anywhere.
A constant challenge for us is improving the ROBLOX world while keeping it scalable–as much as we want ROBLOX to look and feel like a triple-A video game, we have to make sure a wide range of hardware can handle it. With that in mind, we’ve created a lighting and shadows prototype that not only drastically changes the look of our game, but can also run on a range of different machines. In order to create this new look, we’re developing a dynamic light and shadow engine where most of the heavy lifting is done on the CPU (instead of the graphics card) and we’re leveraging a voxel-based data structure to do it.
Continue reading With our recent release of featherweight parts we drastically lightened the load, so to speak, of objects in the ROBLOX graphics pipeline. In an effort to continue down this path, we’re developing a system that can switch between featherweight and non-featherweight parts on the fly, in real time. We like to keep things simple around here, so we’ve elected to call them fast parts.
