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- Another Hack Week is in the books at Roblox! This marks our 7 th annual deep dive into the imaginations of some of Roblox’s most inventive, most daring, and most creative engineers. Hack Week is a yearly event that was created to showcase innovation on the Roblox platform and remove all barriers to our engineers’ wildest ideas.
Can I Get Banned For Using A Roblox Hack/Exploit? If you decide to abuse these hacks and make it very obvious that you are hacking people can report you and after around a 1-2 weeks your account will be flagged as a cheater and you may be banned for around 1 – 7 days after that you will be on a list of cheaters that if you continue to be reported for hacking you will be permanently.
As we mentioned on the blog earlier in the week, Hack Week is an opportunity for ROBLOX staff to explore and prototype their pet projects, and ultimately present them Friday during a company meeting. We thought today would be a great opportunity to take a sneak peak at what our developers have hacked together this year. Remember, these are all purely hypothetical projects — we’re not making any promises here, we’re kicking around ideas in order to form a collective understanding of what projects we could potentially pursue in the future. That being said, we did some really exciting and innovative work in the last week. Check it out!
Arseny Kapoulkine (zeuxcg): Complex Voxel Functions
As you probably know, I’ve recently modified terrain to significantly extend the available range of voxels. This left me wondering: are we implementing terrain in the right way? Is there a fundamentally different approach that can simultaneously produce better visual results close-by and scale nicely to large draw distances and/or old hardware?
While streaming solves the performance problem nicely by severely restricting the distance, streaming does not work in Studio, and sometimes you want to see mountains that are really far away. I decided to try to go in that direction — take the existing voxel data and try to render it in a different way, ultimately producing a terrain surface that is not blocky and edgy, but smooth.
This involves a different approach to generating triangles from voxel data, as well as a different approach to shading those triangles. On a high level, instead of generating a few triangles for every voxel, I treat our voxel data as a very complex function that can tell you if any point in space is solid, water or uninhabited.
One key thing that this enables is high levels of detail — I’ve set up our system so I can generate anywhere from 16x more triangles than our current terrain is capable of generating. As you can imagine, it makes sense to generate more triangles up close and less triangles far away. This means that close-by terrain surfaces can look very appealing and smooth, while still consuming less processing power when far away.
When I thought about the kinds of effects that could further enhance the look of the terrain, I opted for rendering highly detailed 3D grass close by, and enhancing our water effects to include reflection and refraction. Both are implemented in the fastest way possible given the current state of computer graphics, which means that things may not always look correct, but they usually look great.
There are a lot of questions left unanswered, a lot of bugs left to fix and features to add — I feel that the visual results speak for themselves, and I’ve been able to answer the question, “Is there a better approach to rendering terrain?” with a resounding “Yes!”
Jason Roth (jmargh): Tween Animation Part Library
For my hack week project I’m working on a tween animation library for parts. I love to see things move around, rotate and fade on the screen. This has been on my to-do list for a long time, so I figured Hack Week was as good a time as any to start working on it. As I’ve been working on games, I found myself rewriting the same scripts over and over. So I wanted to take this week to write something that can be re-used in the future by myself and other builders. So far I have all the basics — translation, rotation, scale, fading transparency — but I’m hoping to get spline curves in so I can do some curved path animations. The challenge so far has been making sure the library is easy to use by anyone, and that it can easily be extended later without having to go back and fix code. It’s been a fun project so far — it’s satisfying to watch all these parts move about.
Vince D’amelio (CodeWriter): Particle Effects Emitter
For Hack Week, I’ve decided to work on a generic particle effect object that would give builders more control over the effects that appear in their places. Currently, builders are limited to existing effects, with set textures and very limited control of other various attributes. This new effect will allow creators the ability to set the angle, speed, emit rate, lifetime, colors, rotation and even the textures for their particles. Implementing this control has allowed me to dig deeper into the assets, effects and rendering systems. In order to allow builders to specify the textures for the particles, like a decal, I modified the code to allow these images to be loaded while the game is running and tweaked the graphics shader code to draw the particles properly using this new texture. Then I hooked the new effect object’s properties to the particle effect system to allow these settings to adjust the look of the particles as they are modified. The combination of all of these changes create a new object that would allow unprecedented new effects for builders to use within ROBLOX.
Ben Tkacheff (jeditkacheff): iOS Mobile Development App
I worked on adding a mobile developer app for iOS, to be used in conjunction with Studio. When the Games team started developing games that would work well on iPad, it was a tedious process to test. First you had to make a new place, then upload the place, then navigate to your place on the mobile app, then launch the place. What I’ve done is allowed you to pair devices to studio, then do a one-touch deploy to your connected device, which makes the iteration time go from three to four minutes to about 10 seconds. This may seem like a trivial time change, but when you are tightly iterating on a particular piece of code, three to four minutes can feel like a long time.
Kabriel Robichaux (inventx) and Simon Kozlov (gemlocker): ROBLOX on the Oculus Rift
inventx and Shedletsky test ROBLOX on the Oculus Rift
ROBLOX is already a great toolkit for physically simulated multiplayer 3D world. The next logical step is to allow players to fully enter those worlds, and thanks to the Oculus Rift, now we can! Several of us at ROBLOX have a real passion and interest in virtual reality and already have our own Oculus development kits. Since it’s Hack Week, we finally had the time carved out to sit down and get the two sets working together. It is still early — there are things we would need to clean up for full production use — but I’m happy to report that we have the initial working prototype humming away in the office and it looks incredible!
We have already spent some time in several of the games on the site and with the full immersion things feel more real and even more interesting (falling from a tall building in ROBLOX has never felt so scary). I hope we will have everything wrapped up and out for production use before consumer VR kits start hitting the stores in the later half of 2014.
Roblox 2018 Version
Brad Justus (chiefjustus): ROBLOX University & Daily Video Streaming
Not content to let Hack Week be the exclusive province of our Engineering Team, the Communications Team (Andrew, Alan, Michael, with design from Miguel, and support from Luke, with me coaching) tackled not one but two projects. First, we decided to try a daily livestream from ROBLOX HQ — which we thought would be fun for the community, but also instructive for us as we plan a more extensive slate of video offerings for 2014 (live and otherwise). Now we know what it takes to do a daily show (even a brief one)–and we’re full of ideas for what we’ll do in the New Year!
Our mockup of the ROBLOX University main webpage.
Our second project was to create a prototype “ROBLOX University” — a mash-up of Khan Academy, LuaLearners, and the recent proliferation of MOOCs (massive open online courses). What would RU look like? Offering basic, intermediate, and advanced courses (video-based, with supplementary material) in building, scripting, designing, and marketing a game, RU would also permit community-contributed material (like a wiki). Our test lesson features how to use dynamic lighting. We’re intrigued to know if there is community interest in such such course offerings–RU ready for this?
Archive
During this year’s Hack Week, ROBLOX developers shifted gears, working tirelessly to devise and present ideas fueled more by creativity than priority. This week, we’re featuring some of the most innovative ideas to come out of Hack Week. Our third highlighted project is an exploration of how ROBLOX’s in-game, game-browsing and social networking interfaces might look on an iPad. These early-stage mock-ups were conceived and produced by Visual Artist Tara Byars and Visual Designer Miguel Ortiz.
ROBLOX is an expansive platform. So, when it came to mocking up a new ROBLOX interface for a new device, we quickly realized we had to narrow the scope to the stuff users want to do on the go – browse games, play games, network with friends and groups, and buy and sell content.
Remember, these are initial mock-ups, produced outside of Apple’s development API. What you see is not set in stone; rather, we wanted to give give our ideas some tangibility and spark a discussion as to how ROBLOX on the iPad could look and feel. Click each image to view it at full size.
Browse games
The iPad equivalent of the Games page should look familiar to any ROBLOX player. It offers three search methods, and a grid display of games, separated into multiple pages.
View and launch a specific game
The interface for a specific game takes advantage of a classic iOS design feature: the cover flow. This would allow users to swipe their way through image and videos for a given ROBLOX game. Users would also see the game’s description, statistics and badges, the ability to share a game, and a traditional green Play button.
In-game interface
We’ve shown ROBLOX running on an iPad, but there was no interface. This project focused on presentation rather than engineering, leading to this potential in-game interface. As you can see, virtual directional pads would drive character movement, while screen touches would allow users to swap equipment, interact with the environment (e.g., shoot a gun), and bring up the Backpack.
While the iPad offers alternative control schemes, such as tilt, virtual D-pads would feel similar to the traditional mouse-and-keyboard setup. They would also help level the playing field across platforms, as mobile and computer users could be in the same game.
User profile and social networking
Mobile social networking is growing fast. According to TechCrunch, monthly time spent on Facebook’s mobile site and apps (441 minutes) is higher than that of its classic website (391 minutes). About 61% of all tweets come from mobile apps. A key part of ROBLOX on the iPad is social networking.
As you can see in the above image, the ROBLOX profile page would include many important social features – a friends/best friends list that indicates who’s online, a listing of groups, and the ability to follow and message a user. It’s comprehensive, given the screen real estate, but also portable, so users would be able to communicate and organize even when they’re away from their computer.
Again, these are initial mock-ups, produced outside of Apple’s development API. We’re already thinking about these mock-ups at the ROBLOX headquarters, but we’re also interested in hearing what you think.