Many people have requested a way to prevent others from “copying” their place. At lunch today we decided to give an owner control over when his or her place can be duplicated.
If you go to the “Configure My Place” area on your home page you’ll see the new feature.
Continue reading
Those of you who were online this Thursday evening and Friday morning had a sneak peak of our ROBLOX badges feature. We have had heavy traffic this Friday morning. Coupled with the new statistics and badges pages, our database machine started pegging at 100% and http://www.roblox.com/ went to a slow crawl. We are fixing right now and have taken the badges pages offline. In the interim, all statistics that go towards badges are still being gathered.
For those of you who are curious about badges (and missed the unintentional sneak preview), I’ll repeat the descriptions of the first round of badges here. Kudos to Matt and Erik for getting this cranking.
Continue reading I write the physics code in ROBLOX and have just finished a major re-write to add articulated characters. The new engine is fast, simple and easier to maintain (we hope!). When I look at what I threw out, I see lots of code that was prematurely optimized.
Some background on the ROBLOX physics engine. It’s designed to handle colliding bodies and joints in roughly order-N time. This means that 1000 colliding bodies should only be twice as slow as 500 colliding bodies. The engine is constantly evolving and has not been highly optimized. For example, there are many areas of the ROBLOX engine that would lend themselves to SIMD code (doing four numeric operations in parallel). This has not been done yet. The engine has been designed to work on n-core processing architectures, but once again we have not made this optimization. We’re looking forward to getting our hands on a quad-core box to see if our physics really runs 4x faster!
Continue reading 