The ROBLOX Rendering team made 2014 yet another year of beautification for ROBLOX, unveiling such eye candy as new particle effects, new material textures, and environmental reflections, and even transitioned to an entirely new rendering engine developed just for our platform. To top off the year, this week the team launched two final updates: a new texture-rendering technique that reduces repetitious tiling, and a new explosion particle effect.

Wang tiling for material textures

One of the challenges when applying a single material texture to a large piece of an environment is the patterning that becomes visible at certain distances. For example, in the past, if you made a large cobblestone wall and pulled your camera far away, you would see repeating tiles of the cobblestone texture. Using Wang tiling, rendering engineer Michal “ConvexRumbler” Benatsky has largely eliminated the repetition. This technique is currently being tested on cobblestone — the most challenging material on which to implement Wang tiling — and we intend to apply it to additional textures in 2015 to make ROBLOX creations look better both up close and far away.

Left: Wang tiling enabled. Right: Wang tiling disabled. You can see the reduction in patterns on the left image. Click to view at full size.

New explosion particle effect

In October, Max “maxvee” Volkov launched new particle effects for fire, smoke, sparkles, and the spawn forcefield. You can read all about the implementation of these effects in the original blog post. We promised at that time to deliver a new look for explosions, as well, and that has now become reality, unifying all of the standard particle effects with a single aesthetic. The new explosion incorporates a flash, a shockwave, fire, shrapnel, and leaves behind a cloud of smoke, making it one of the more complex effects. Because explosions are naturally exciting, here’s a quick montage of the new look occurring in a smattering of user-created ROBLOX games.

Enjoy these graphics updates and, as always, let us know your feedback. We’ll be back with more in 2015.