Imagine being able to simulate a snowball fight with friends or watch live, 3D previews of new experiences on Roblox …. does it seem impossible? Out-of-this world? Per tradition, Builders spent a week this past December taking the vision of our platform to the next level.
We followed some teams around and are back with a new installment of our Roblox Hack Week 2023 docuseries — plus some exciting new content just for you! This three-part series follows three teams as they imagine the future of the platform.
In Episode 1, Founder and Chief Executive Officer David Baszucki kicks off Hack Week, reminding us why each year we take the time to “travel” into the future and imagine what Roblox could be as a 3D communication and connection platform. Teams start brainstorming and get to hacking.
Hack Week 2023 was particularly special, as all employees were able to participate through either a hack (forward-thinking projects that break new ground) or unhack (refining our existing systems and processes). 661 teams took part in our tradition, pushing the boundaries of our innovation.
Over the next couple of days, we’ll release the other two episodes — and in our next post, we’ll dive into the technical details of a handful of projects to see how Builders approached technical challenges. Each team imagined what Roblox could look like in the next few years to elevate what’s possible for creators and users alike.
Please note that these Hack Week projects were created to spark innovation and we want to share these with you solely as a way to showcase our culture of innovation. We are NOT guaranteeing that we’ll build this technology into our products in the future. You can head to our Creator Roadmap for information on upcoming product features.
Would appreciate a place where we can view every single project for my own personal interest. Would also appreciate possibly being able to support certain hacks and have them be prioritized as something developers want.
It’s a week where Roblox employees experiment by creating prototypes in the Roblox engine for various ideas. Some of those prototypes ended up becoming fully fledged features, like Future is Bright and the smooth terrain system, but it’s important to know that none of these are guaranteed to be features and are just experiments.
Thanks for mentioning this. I can’t stand people saying that Roblox is easily capable of releasing “x” feature and linking a Hack Week video for “proof.”
I think Roblox should push more content showcasing Roblox employees working on things. It shows that there are actual people behind the scenes of Roblox. Unfortunately, there’s this idea that Roblox is full of either bots, outsourced people thousands of miles away from Roblox HQ, or money-hungry executives that sit on a golden throne.
yeah these are great until you realize most of the actual cool development features that are shown in hack week are never added (shaders were shown in 2014!)…
shaders really should have been made first, not a new lighting system. every time i watch a hack week it just makes me angry because most if not all of these things will never actually be implemented (even though they are very good)
Not gonna lie, i like hack weeks though honestly hack weeks feel like they’re becoming less and less about finicky cool fun tech made by nerds but rather more about corporate “professional” systems designed to meet some magic corporate sillicon valley tech bro term. Most hack week stuff we’ve been shown (and are being shown) look more like things that you would expect to see any random roblox update rather than something new, fun, surprising and interesting.
This isn’t to hate on hack weeks. I like them! Though taking the focus away from the fun finicky half functional prototype tech and giving it to safe and medium to mostly small features that look like they would have been released as standard average roblox updates lowers the quality of the hack weeks. You don’t need crazy cinematography, expensive camera equipment and hollywood levels of movie production to present a good hack week. I just want to see some crazy, barely functional, fun and interesting tech made by true nerds.
“Corporatism” and “professionalism” are the bane of modern tech.
As @MLGwarfare04 has rightly pointed out with shaders and the hack week, imho these hack weeks have more useful stuff than what jank ROBLOX releases in years.
This abysmal direction of this platform’s engine really can’t be outdone for how popular Roblox is, and I hope to cover more detail via an article and video on this sometime from the lens of a Full Stack Game Developer. It’s been 10 years, and the arbitrary black box on its limitations that ROBLOX creates for its engine hasn’t decreased in the slightest and has clearly wanted serve the cash grab devs who couldn’t care less about the platform rather than the long term devs who want to release original titles however unable to do with the limitations. It’s safe to say ROBLOX has not failed to disappoint me or many others in the slightest. With all the things they could have added; what I and other early devs have wanted since 2016 was added embarrassingly late:
Support For Custom Shaders, VFX, and Geometry Nodes.
UDIMS Tiles so people don’t have to suffer with 1k texture per mesh.
Realtime Mesh And Image Creation (Now out as EditableMesh/Image but was laying around in the engine for YEARS)
Some much more discrete graphics options, on top of low-level APIs for developers to truly adjust the game on the lower level example: Screen Space Reflection (SSR) option for higher end devices”
What’s not an example wasting your resources on creating:
Useless Physics Constraints with black boxes in what you can do with them instead of a more extensive Physics and Maths library for the more serious programmers like I’ve used in Unreal, Unity, Godot (Jolt), and works like a charm since their not specialized in functionality.
AI Code Assist/Assistant
Material Generator
And this is just the tip of the iceberg with paramount features roblox lacks for an engine in 2024 and to think roblox is innovating as an engine when see the likes of other engines…
Stop it!!! Stop! It does not accord to our corporate values nor does it follow the orders of the metaverse. This is so ignorant and people don’t realize that the features are hard to program. You say we listen to the community, but what about the investors? They’ve gave Roblox more money which gave the PLATFORM a popularity boost and some cool updates over the past few years like the forced dynamic heads! People would write a whole book on why bouncing lights and shadows are important on this platform.
^^ Haha, nailed it. “We are truly so proud, privileged, and honored to announce the future of the metaverse, something that will change ROBLOX forever. ROBLOX has day and night been working on releasing this and not been messing around with useless AIs, also working hard to not make content for @AbstractAlex 's Roblox’s Jank Of The Week. I’m proud to announce phone calls on ROBLOX!!! We have proved many time that Roblox is committed to listening to its developers request.”
Unreal Engine 2 casually releasing skinned meshes in 2000: “ʘ‿ʘ”
(Seriously, be sure to check out Unreal Engine 2’s trailer. Still impressive to this day, 24 years later and Godot’s 3.1 trailer to 2023 showcase reel. Godot’s amazing outlook and ecosystem for the engine is what path Roblox had the opportunity to go down, especially with the extra responsibilities ROBLOX has to scale these features on a stream able platform Godot’s ecosystem is a amazing, and so far, it blew it to even emulate something at least similar.)
Don’t worry, we are making some advancements just like unreal engine 5/epic games! They released a while ago their procedural generator systems that they showcased on foliage in near real time! On Roblox we have something just like that! The legendary (in beta) grass length slider update that took around 2-4 teams of people! See? We also have fancy grass and foliage sliders! It’s only one so far but still!!!
Imagine being able to simulate a snowball fight with friends or watch live, 3D previews of new experiences on Roblox …. does it seem impossible? Out-of-this world? Per tradition, Builders spent a week this past December taking the vision of our platform to the next level.
— plus some exciting new content just for you! This three-part series follows three teams as they imagine the future of the platform.
