Last month, ROBLOX launched a new rendering feature known as “outlines.” Outlines essentially draw a black border around all the edges you see in ROBLOX worlds; helping to establish a more unified aesthetic between the vast array of creations. While they’re a work in progress and we’ve since decided to make them optional, the way we arrived at their implementation was a challenging process of considering the industry standards and developing our own solution. We ultimately settled on a technique that fits squarely within the confines of our platform and is entirely scalable to a wide range of legacy hardware.
The Extrusion Method
With the extrusion method, developers first create an extruded (slightly bigger) version of the 3D object, render it black, and place the original object on top–the resulting image creates the illusion of a black and bold frame encompassing the 3D object. This is an expensive process computationally–in order to pursue this method, we’d have to render everything twice (the object and the outline frame), which would lead to a larger pool of users with older hardware who simply couldn’t experience ROBLOX. So we took a look at…
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You Can Now Toggle Outlines
As announced at BLOXcon London and shortly thereafter in a Comments on Comments article, we’ve decided to make the recently launched outlines feature optional for all ROBLOX builders and game developers. While we do see outlines as part of our vision for the ROBLOX aesthetic – and they do look great in many instances (see screenshot at right) – the feedback we’ve received indicates they don’t yet work everywhere. We will continue to work toward a perfect implementation but, in the meantime and with the latest version of ROBLOX Studio, you now have complete control.
Similar to dynamic lighting, toggling outlines works on two levels: you have a global “switch,” which is checked by default, for turning outlines on and off across an entire place, and fine-grain control over individual part surfaces.
Continue reading Outlines: The Latest Step Toward a Unified Aesthetic
Many video games and software-based tools have a unified aesthetic. Not only is it visually pleasing, it’s a useful means of distinguishing a product. In ROBLOX, that unified aesthetic can go missing – while everything is built from the same set of primitives and blocks of terrain, there are stark differences in what you see from one game to the next. We want our platform to have a look that speaks to our vision and screams ROBLOX, while still scaling to a wide range of hardware and giving you complete creative freedom to express your own vision. Today, we took another step toward that goal by enabling outlines on ROBLOX parts.
Outlines are a very experimental feature and, accordingly, we’ve enabled them in a very subtle way – thin, light and drawn only in close proximity. In some cases, they’re hardly noticeable; in others, their light touch blends with dynamic lighting and our material shading for a dramatic effect. We believe, across the board, they contribute to a look that ROBLOX can call its own.
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