Spotlight: Mechs, Motors and More With TakeoverTom

By Alan Fackler - September 12, 2012

It’s rare that we have the opportunity to spotlight a user who lives in our immediate area. So we jumped at the opportunity to meet TakeoverTom, who lives only minutes from our offices in San Mateo, CA. He swung by our offices with a green box in tow. This was inside.

Robust Joints and Motors: Keys to Better Vehicles in ROBLOX

By Kevin He - July 27, 2012

At ROBLOX Game Conference 2012, Kevin He dissected the steps he’s taken to refine ROBLOX’s water physics, hinges and motors so that vehicles – especially boats – perform more realistically. In this blog post, we’re recapping the key parts of the development process. You might be surprised at how much work goes into physically simulating real-world machines in a life-like fashion.

ROBLOX’s water, released in June, gives you the ability to create a boat that floats based on actual physical properties, rather than lines of Lua code. While the release of water marked a big step forward for ROBLOX, it has its limits; for example, if you want to create a propeller-powered boat, the propellers have to be on the side of the boat, as though they’re mimicking wheels on a car.

Testing the Accuracy of ROBLOX Physics with Potato Cannons

By Sorcus - June 7, 2012

ROBLOX is built on a comprehensive physics engine, and our developers are constantly optimizing it so it can handle interactions between more physics objects and players, in an increasingly accurate and consistent way. We recently put our engine to the test with a new projectile-motion simulator – and most satisfying armament – the ROBLOX Potato Cannon. According to the results, which we describe in this article, we’re on the right trajectory.

The ROBLOX Potato Cannon mimics its real-world counterpart, a contraption traditionally constructed using a pipe and some means of generating air pressure. The difference is our potato cannon automatically performs the calculations you need to hit your target. We constructed the potato cannon so it computes the launch angle and, with the velocity at a constant 300 studs/second, the correct trajectory for your now-deadly potato. If your target is outside its range, it defaults to the maximum distance it can shoot.

How ROBLOX is Improving its Network Physics

By Andrew Haak - March 19, 2012

If you drive a real-life car into a brick wall, the car doesn’t simply bounce back. With enough speed, it causes the brick wall to come crashing down in a destructive display of physics. (Just trust us on this.)

To make sure these kinds of things happen in ROBLOX, as in the real world, ROBLOX Senior Game Engine Developer Kevin He has made some improvements to ROBLOX’s distributed physics engine. Today, he’ll show us the improvements with a number of video demos.

Tech Demo: Water, Buoyancy and Ropes

By David Baszucki - January 18, 2012

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

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