Build Bigger Than Ever Before

By Arseny Kapoulkine - December 7, 2013

When we released voxel terrain in 2011, we realized that creators had to adhere to a narrowly defined set of rules. As with any major release, we kept a steady ear to the ground and gathered as much feedback as possible to determine how to improve the feature make it a more viable and enjoyable tool for building. Though we’ll be updating the overall “look” or our terrain the coming months, infrastructural changes first had to be made to broaden the scope of terrain capabilities. We distilled your feedback into three significant improvements, each of which we’ve been working to address.

Using Run Length Encoding (RLE) to Compress ROBLOX Terrain

By Daniel Ignatoff - June 13, 2012

ROBLOX released its high-performance terrain feature late in 2011, allowing users to create and play games significantly larger than anything previously seen on the platform. Many ROBLOX users have since taken advantage of terrain, particularly to facilitate expansive games with fast vehicles. Currently, the ROBLOX Content Team is pushing the feature further than ever before with a new game that procedurally generates destructible, cliff- and gold-ridden terrain each round (we’ll have more on that soon).

Terrain can be up to 2048 x 256 x 2048 studs in dimension, containing up to 16 million 4 x 4 x 4 terrain cells, with no graphics slow-down. One of the supporting techniques we use to make terrain so scalable and efficient is Run Length Encoding. Run Length Encoding makes the file sizes of terrain places a small fraction of what it would be with normal parts.