Blog Archive

Getting Better All the Time

October 30, 2007

by John Shedletsky


Archive

We put out another huge release today. Big improvements have been made to the graphics engine and the ROBLOX Catalog.

Graphics

We now have beveled blocks and they look beautiful! If your graphics card has 256 MB of video RAM or more, they will be turned on automatically. Also Wookong’s graphics engine is now the default, so if you weren’t seeing the cool new explosions in-game, you will be now! Furthermore, users with slow computers may see huge speed improvements in large levels, especially in multiplayer games. ROBLOX will now detect when your FPS (frames per second) drops in large games and try to start drawing fewer bricks, speeding things up. Matt and I were wandering around in the Roblox Museum level the other day and the speed improvements were amazing. Try it.

Bevels

Beveled bricks look like candy. If ROBLOX decides your graphics card is not good enough to turn on bevels automatically, you can force them to be drawn (though they may slow down your game slightly). This is not a supported feature, so if fiddling with your settings messes up your game, just click the Reset All Settings button and forget about the whole thing.

How to turn on Bevels manually:

  1. Open ROBLOX Studio
  2. Goto Tools -> Settings -> Rendering
  3. Set Bevels to ON.
  4. Make sure graphicsMode is either Direct3D experimental or Automatic
  5. If you have a really good graphics card, also set Antialiasing to ON, it will make the bevels look even better!

ROBLOX Catalog Improvements

How many times have you been shopping for a quality battle armor, only to get stuck paging through 100s of useless shirts made by noobs? I say, no more! Let there be search!

In addition to adding search, Matt was able to squeeze in comments for hats and shirts. The ultimate goal is to extend the comment system to places, but that didn’t get into this release. For now, if someone publishes a really cool shirt, you can leave a message saying that you liked it. Or you can brag about how awesome your Teapot Hat is.

Longer list of improvements

  • Beveled bricks
  • Rendering speed improvements from culling
  • Search for catalog
  • Comments for catalog
  • Improved First Person camera mode
  • New graphics now the default on all machines
  • Many crashes fixed 

– Telamon