Building vehicles, both in real life and virtual worlds, is a complex process that involves many moving parts and an appreciation for physics. It’s easy to take the process for granted–most games feature them prominently and put you in control and on the road at the press of a button.

But ROBLOX is all about building and engineering, and and that includes vehicle creation. We stumbled across ManyFireman‘s awesome Ro-Scania Trucking Simulator, which features over a dozen trucks he custom built, and a nice, open world to drive them around. We were impressed not only by the vast array of mega-vehicles, but by how realistically they drove. The game plays like an old limerick would read: ManyFireman builds many trucks of many different shapes and sizes.

ManyFireman became fascinated by semi-trucks after being introduced to a trucking group on ROBLOX. He’s since created his own trucking group, the DAF, and started building his own trucks of varying lengths and styles. He’s created over a dozen trucks, and built Ro-Scania Trucking Simulator 2013 as a place to store and drive his creations.

“My favorite truck is the DAF XF, due to its beauty,” he says. “It’s really modern. Scripting the trucks was the most challenging aspect of building them. Lua has always been really hard for me to understand, but I didn’t give up. I think I got where I needed to be by the end.”

Inspired by other successful trucking games, like Moonzee’s European Scania Deluxe Simulator, ManyFireman got to work on creating a large city for his trucks to populate. He tells me that the level originally started as just one or two roads, and that all of the details have been tacked on methodically over time. Now, the city looks more alive–a massive plane is in the process of landing. There are cops arresting criminals on the street. There are stores and shops everywhere, including a cafe where you can make a pit stop, and a main office with vending machines. Dynamic lighting allowed him to light up his city–there’s a cycling day and night script, and the roads, gas stations and trucks themselves have realistic lighting.

“It started basically as a road, and a few generic buildings. I just kept developing more and more things. Turns, bumps, shops, speed limits. I recently added huge fire trucks you can drive in the hanger, and I think the plane gives the level another touch of realism.”

He goes on to explain to me the general process of building trucks, which involves fracturing the model several times to insert details, than rebuilding them. Though it seemed like a complex procedure, he says after making so many, he’s gotten the hang of it. Still, he’s always looking for improvements.

“There are lots of changes I’d like to see that would really help builders who make cars,” he says. “Like individually turning wheels, an auto limit of 75 miles per hour, and some way to make trucks less laggy.”

When building such massive vehicles, ManyFireman seems to constantly remind himself that the devil is in the details. And speaking of the devil, our very own Physics and Rendering Specialist Kevin He recently showed off a prototype video that had a lot to do with trucking. We thought this would be the perfect opportunity to sit down with an already-experienced truck builder and ask, “What differences do you notice?”

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ManyFireman: This is so awesome. The turning looks substantially different, and I love the balloons. Wow, he really plowed through those non-solid blocks, that’s really realistic. I hate getting stuck when I hit non-solid blocks. The truck is also reacting to bumps way more realistically. Is that bridge made out of normal bricks?

ROBLOX: No, it’s something else.

ManyFireman: Is that rope? Whoa! That is so awesome.

Suffice to say, we’ve got some big announcements coming up in the physics and rendering department, and we can’t wait to see what intrepid builders like ManyFireman will do with these changes. That’s later on down the line, and ManyFireman already has a ton of plans for the immediate future.

Barreling down the interstate in a BLOXcon themed semi.

“I’m not done building this,” he says confidently. “I want to extend the base, and make a bigger area for the trucks. I’ve also been toying with the idea of giving user-objectives, like hangars where you could unload cargo. That’s a big maybe at this point, but I’ve definitely given it some thought.”