Some surprising conclusions jump out when comparing time spent playing online, mobile, and facebook games. People spend one hour playing ROBLOX for every 20 hours kids around the world play with physical LEGO bricks. Twice as much time is spent on Xbox Live as is spent playing Zynga games. 

Some of the data was hard to find, and some figures are estimates. Destinations are compared by Total Players, Total Time, and Time per Player. See the end of this post for the data sources, along with which values had to be estimated.

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Today LEGO Universe will shut down after being live for 15 months. The product is beautiful, and many good designers, engineers and animators poured their hearts into bringing it to life. From afar it appears that an unfortunate combination of organizational issues, high expectations, and complexity may have all contributed to the shutdown.

High expectations

The dream of LEGO Universe was captured in early press releases and video trailers. Trailers showed a bustling city made of LEGO, with vehicles, monsters, and highly engaged mini-figs. Demonstrations of “creating” were also very cool, with virtual translucent blue-prints and lightning fast vehicle construction. Users were captivated by the dream, and soon the press was talking about how the game might be bigger than World of Warcraft.

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Hack Week coverage continues with a unified tech demo by Dan Ignatoff, Erik Cassel and Tim Loduha showing water, buoyancy and ropes working together.

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This is a first look at the ROBLOX code stack running on an iPad. Product specs are in development and there is no announced ship date. The tap-to-move interface shown in the demo is a place holder for future thumb controls. Textures and skyboxes are disabled.

We are building off the same code as our PC and Mac clients. Rendering speed is surprisingly good. Features, bug-fixes and enhancements for the PC/Macintosh ROBLOX will show up on the iPad. Over 95% of our code base is common among all platforms, including networking, rendering, physics, sound, core, threading and lua execution.  The demo is running in full client-server mode with networking.  We can join ROBLOX servers with the iPad demo over WiFi.

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SOPA is a bill that was introduced by the House Judicial Committee on October 26, 2011. Its purpose, as stated in the text of the bill found in H.R. 3261, is to “promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation” within the multimedia complex. Passage of the bill would broaden the ability of and embolden law enforcement agencies and copyright holders to combat and reduce copyright infringement on the Internet. It is currently pending in the House of Representatives.

The purpose of this post is to explain why the stance of ROBLOX is in firm opposition to the passage of SOPA. Here are three reasons:

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How do you represent objects and terrain in a 3D video game?  A partial list includes triangle-meshes (very common), geometric primitives (ROBLOX), and height maps (terrain).  Today I’m going to talk about another way of modeling objects and terrain – the voxel.

Voxels store information in a 3D grid.  In the simplest case, all of the 3D space in your video game is divided into a grid, and each cell in the grid is either empty (air) or full (ground).  To make the world look more realistic, each cell can be a different color or material.  Just like with your mega-pixel camera or HDTV – the more voxels, the more realistic the game world.

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How do you represent objects and terrain in a 3D video game?  A partial list includes triangle-meshes (very common), geometric primitives (ROBLOX), and height maps (terrain).  Today I’m going to talk about another way of modeling objects and terrain – the voxel.

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