For the last five or so days, we’ve had dynamic lighting enabled on a small test environment. Today, we moved the feature over to the more robust GameTest1 environment so more builders can experiment with it simultaneously. While it’s news enough that you can play with dynamic lighting today, we’ve also launched a dynamic lighting video contest to let you future masters of light and darkness show your prowess!

The contest

You have until Thursday, April 25th at 11:59 p.m. PT to create something incredible using dynamic lighting, capture 30 to 60 seconds of footage of it, and submit your video. You can either build something brand new for the express purpose of showing off the beauty of dynamic lighting, or modify one of your existing places/games to illustrate the before-and-after results. Regardless of the avenue you pursue, the content you submit must be your own. You can submit your entry and see the complete instructions/timeline here.

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Many readers pour significant time into writing thoughtful replies to our blog articles, and we want to make sure we address them. Comments on Comments exists so you get answers, straight from a ROBLOX developer, to your questions. For this post, we’ve tapped a handful of ROBLOX’s staff, to answer a wide range of questions about dynamic lighting and our recent removal of bevels, the making of our 2013 ROBLOX Egg Hunt, our recent Spotlight Article featuring a digital recreation of Rome, some camera tweaks and fixes and much more.

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Last week, we notified you of some rendering changes we would be implementing in order to enhance performance while simultaneously setting the stage for our future look, which will include dynamic lighting and an updated, unified aesthetic. Today, the initial round of changes has begun. We’ve turned off bevels–they hurt performance and don’t fit our vision for the future look of ROBLOX–and shipped new rendering code that improves performance, particularly in the context of rendering static environments on slow and/or dated hardware.

Turning off bevels not only boosts performance, but also will enable us to ship dynamic lighting sooner. We’re already playing ROBLOX Battle with it turned on!

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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.

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We got the chance to sit down and chat with Simon Kozlov, Client Engine Lead for ROBLOX, about the implementation of shadows, how they came to be, and where he hopes they go in the future. What do you have for us, Simon?

People take shadows for granted. The placement of shadows on 3D models is integral for your brain and eyes to understand how large something is, how heavy it is, and how close or far away it is from you, just to name a few things. So creating realistic shadows in ROBLOX is very important to us.

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