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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