Sneak Peek?

By John Shedletsky - March 17, 2008

Here’s a video showcasing one of the many exciting things that we are currently working on. Coming to you in an upcoming release!

Good-bye camelCase, Hello delay()

By Erik Cassel - August 17, 2007

Note: This is one of those highly technical articles. If you want something lighter then go here.

The latest build is primarily bug-fix release. However, weâ€™ve added a couple of small scripting enhancements recently.

RocketPropulsion

By Erik Cassel - June 28, 2007

Thereâ€™s a new â€œRocketPropulsionâ€ object in town. It works similarly to the BodyGyro and BodyPosition objects, but this one moves a part around in a manner not unlike a rocket.Â For a sample of this new feature, visit my place.

Disclaimer: This is a preliminary feature and it may change in the future.Â Also, this feature is for advanced users who understand a little physics.

Cleaning Up an Old Script

By John Shedletsky - May 17, 2007

One of my favorite tasks at work is to clean up old code. You know what I mean: Itâ€™s like the pleasure you get from throwing those smelly socks in the clothes hamper, putting your books back on the shelf and trashing the old apple core thatâ€™s been moldering under your bed. Wellâ€¦ maybe you donâ€™t know what I mean.

Dear Telamon…

By John Shedletsky - February 26, 2007

This morning is a momentous occasion. I am emptying my Inbox. Often people send me messages like “… so-and-so was calling me names, please do something…” or “yo dude, give me a custom character plz…”. However, occasionally I get some interesting questions to which I send a thoughtful response. I’m going to start posting some of these. The first is from MrDoomBringer, with whom I exchange several messages a week.

MrDoomBringer writes:

Dreaming in Code

By John Shedletsky - January 22, 2007

Software is hard. – Knuth

The evils of optimizing too early…

By David Baszucki - December 18, 2006

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!