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.

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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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You’ve probably noticed by now that the lights are on in ROBLOX Mobile. As with many significant rendering updates, getting dynamic lighting to illuminate iPhone and iPad screens was a tricky endeavor that brought our engineers face to face with some very specific technical hurdles. We got the chance to sit down with Graphics and Rendering Specialist Arseny Kapoulkine to get the scoop on porting dynamic lighting to mobile devices.

Shaders

To understand how we pulled this off, let’s start simple. Computers that can support dynamic lighting (about 97% of the computers running ROBLOX) are able to do so by utilizing shaders built into their graphics card. So our first question was, “will we be able to utilize the graphics technology bundled into iPhones and iPads to utilize shaders?” Lucky for us, iPads and iPhones 4 and higher have shader support baked in.

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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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Next week, we’ll be releasing new rendering code that will boost performance by up to 3X, enabling more people to play games that have tens of thousands of parts. Part of the performance boost will stem from turning off bevels, which round the corners of bricks. The rest will come from featherweight parts and fast parts technology applying to ROBLOX parts of all shapes, sizes and materials, and a dynamic quality adjustment sensor that automatically adjusts material quality based on your hardware. The following video demonstrates the performance differences in a place that has over a hundred thousand parts.

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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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With our recent release of featherweight parts we drastically lightened the load, so to speak, of objects in the ROBLOX graphics pipeline. In an effort to continue down this path, we’re developing a system that can switch between featherweight and non-featherweight parts on the fly, in real time. We like to keep things simple around here, so we’ve elected to call them fast parts. 

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