A Brief History of Physics in Video Games

By David Baszucki - December 14, 2011

Objects in the real world operate under the laws of physics – so it seems quite intuitive that everything in video games (console, PC, online, mobile, arcade) should as well. The graphics world has evolved towards hardware acceleration on dedicated chips with better and better realism. The physics world is a long ways behind. There aren’t many video games today (in fact there aren’t any!) where you can take out a hack saw, cut off a piece of metal from a scrap heap, weld it to your car, and then have the metal bend when your car wrecks! Today I will review some of the phases in video game physics here and talk a bit about the future.

Early Phase – Special Purpose Physics Engines

Data: Only the Most Valuable Thing in the World

By John Shedletsky - April 14, 2011

The ROBLOX data centers are about to get toasty – today we’re releasing our data persistence API to ROBLOX game developers!

Pondering the Future of Social Gaming

By David Baszucki - November 4, 2010

Mancala

Gaming has always been a social activity. Recent excavations of an ancient house in Jordan uncovered an 8,000 year old limestone Mancala board. For more information on the history of games check out some even earlier Hunter / Gatherer games.

Focusing on Performance

By David Baszucki - May 13, 2009

I’ve been talking to a bunch of you and I know that everyone wants more performance. ROBLOX users will achieve ultimate happiness when we have a 1,000,000 block world with 1,000 players updating at 100 FPS (frames per second). No promises on when that day will be, but until then, here is what we are doing to improve performance. We just pushed a new release today that will allow us to measure many things that our users experience, such as…

Install Success Rate: We want to see how high we can push this (already pretty high)

Vehicle Mania!

By David Baszucki - May 5, 2009

We released a new game object today – the “Vehicle Seat”. Vehicle seats automate a bunch of things to create easily drivable, online multiplayer vehicles. We’ve also added some prototype vehicle chassis to the toolbox. You can get vehicle seats from the toolbox as well.

When you attach a vehicle seat to a model a bunch of things happen. All hinge joints in the model are detected. Joints that align with the forward/backward direction of the seat are automatically powered when a character sits in the seat. Vehicles are controlled with the arrow and asdw letter keys. To leave a vehicle – just jump with the space bar.