Meet the Teams: Roblox Hack Week 2023 Docuseries Ep. 2

The pressure is on as the teams wrap up their hacks and think about how to present their projects – it’s a race to the finish line and time is ticking! (ICYMI, check out the first episode where we introduce three of the teams.)

Roblox Founder and CEO David Baszucki, Chief Product Officer Manuel Bronstein, and Chief Technology Officer Daniel Sturman visit a few of the teams to check in on their progress.

As promised, let’s dive deeper into a few of the Hack Week teams’ projects, both from the docuseries and a handful of others. 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.

Take a look at how the teams describe their projects below and feel free to show your love, ask questions, and let us know — who has what it takes to win? :trophy:

Asset & Tool Subscriptions :hammer_and_pick:

From @rockythecorgi68 and team:

Click for more details.

At RDC 23, we announced subscriptions within experiences. Asset and tool creators who build and sell developer tools in Creator Store expressed interest in subscriptions as well . So, our project focused on enabling creators to have recurring revenue from plugins by charging a subscription, in case other creators only need it for a finite amount of time. Or, they could sell the asset or tool as a one-time purchase.

We had trouble with the project’s technical scope and determining what aspects would be achievable given our timeframe, so we prioritized making an MVP and saving more difficult tasks for later. Making every aspect of the subscription flow feel consistent was challenging — our computers kept crashing from trying to integrate multiple screen recordings and animations.

Our goal was to provide more creators access to reliable income streams and support them in producing quality tools within the Creator Store.


Roblox Live :movie_camera:

From @Nexx @christ0pherus and team:

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Ever feel like you’re endlessly scrolling through Roblox, struggling to find that perfect experience? Our team built Roblox Live to spectate any experience in full 3D as if you were really there. From Home, you can preview and move around in an experience picked from your recommendations. You can also preview where your friends are in real time. Once you join an experience, you’ll be seamlessly transported to the spawn point.

To create Roblox Live, we built a new tile on the Homepage that would take you into a pre-selected experience to spectate. We modified TeleportService to allow seamless transitions between games and used Roblox Studio for testing camera controls and used React-lua to build out the UI. Our biggest technical challenge was that assets in the world would take a while to load, so we decreased the graphic settings which allowed a user to join the experience before the assets had fully loaded. Other challenges included camera control and UI being overridden by the developer, leading to inconsistent results depending on the experience. We realized there’s no one size fits all solution for spectating that works for every experience.

We see spectating as a new feature for devs to curate their experiences for potential players. Managing spectator behaviors could be facilitated through a developer API, empowering developers to customize camera subjects, perspectives, and comprehensive control over information that’s visible to spectators. Long term, we could also see Roblox Live as a new way to engage with influencers, through a live chat that would allow spectators to drop gifts or hinder game play.


Snoblox :snowflake:

From @eronaught @TheRabbitDeveloper and team:

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Do you wanna build a snow…ball fight on Roblox? Our team’s project involved bringing physical materials to the platform by implementing the Material Point Method (MPM). Materials in MPM are represented as particles without connectivity, allowing for deformation and fracture. We see utilizing the existing particle system as an opportunity to provide developers with a more dynamic materials system.Our project unlocks a new world of possible materials for developers to express themselves with. From shifting sand to fluffy snow, the sky’s the limit.

Much of our time was spent debugging the snow physics, and we heavily used Paraview to examine our simulation results. The biggest technical challenge was debugging the snow physics. After our initial implementation, we found that every time we would start a simulation, it would almost immediately become unstable and “explode” (snow particles would start moving very fast). By visualizing the results in Paraview, we could examine exactly what forces were applied to each particle. The other technical challenge was achieving adequate performance to have the simulations run in real-time. We addressed this by adding multi-threading to most steps of the simulation. This allowed us to fully utilize the hardware and simulate much larger amounts of snow.


Studio Web Plugins :electric_plug:

From @FriendlyAdder and team:

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Our hack week project aims to connect Studio and Web workflows with deep integration of Creator Hub and Studio to make creation even easier and more fun. We integrated Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), which drives apps like Spotify and Steam, with Roblox Studio to render the web content. We reimagined Toolbox (Creator Store), adding animated video tiles, client-side interactive analytics charts, and markdown for asset descriptions. Looking ahead, we see a future beyond Creator Store, where this is a first step in further merging Creator Hub and Studio.

A big part of our hack was exploring the crossover between engine and web rendering. We implemented interactive asset preview as a ViewportFrame rendered into an HTML canvas, with working controls. Passing inputs and frame data back and forth with clean abstractions was a fun challenge. We pushed this as far as we could, rendering a 3D scene running with WebGL and WASM to an off-screen CEF window, which is then shown in an EditableImage at a drive-in theater in the experience we built. We were able to use the Chromium developer tools throughout the project, which let us iterate rapidly.

We think that the community could benefit from more seamless creation workflows, and that shared UI codebases and surfaces can aid that vision. There’s also potential to enable developer tools and plugins with non-native UIs from outside the platform.


3D Marketplace :mirror_ball:

From @PerfectlyCromulent and team:

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The current Marketplace is 2D, relying on static thumbnail images – nothing fancy. Now, imagine a 3D marketplace. It downloads assets just like it would if it was running an actual experience. It renders avatars to show what items would look like on your avatar while moving. You could actually preview what you’re going to buy in a way that hasn’t been done before. When you’re selecting an item, it can rotate and bounce – we used particle effects inside the marketplace. A fluid interface like this could make your existing avatar preview feel like a shopping companion.

To build 3D Marketplace, we created a new page and loaded the assets into 3D space. We wired up the existing metadata, such as title, price, etc. into 3D space engine components and wired up existing detail and purchasing flows to those elements. For bundles, we rendered the user’s current avatar wearing the items as well, so that the user could see a real preview of the content. We also added an avatar preview that would flip up from the bottom of the screen and wave to the user to show what any item or bundle looks like on the current avatar while it’s in motion.

Taking this project a step further, we would identify production quality options for integrating local rendering with the current 2D marketplace implementation. Our goal would be to get localized and dynamic item cards without having to completely reimplement the marketplace in 3D space.


Data Whisperer :speech_balloon:

From @yxjiang and team:

Click for more details.

We built an agent-based knowledge discovery system called Data Whisperer. Data Whisperer is a tool that can help people quickly get insights via natural language conversation. Data Whisperer operates exclusively within our secure internal environment, ensuring data privacy is maintained.

This tool can support internal knowledge discovery and would be able to offer potential benefits to the creator community. By providing valuable data insights, Data Whisperer could assist creators in identifying and leveraging growth opportunities.

The primary technical challenge stemmed from the ongoing development within the field of Conversational AI, a domain still being actively researched and explored. We managed to address some of the data inquiries using existing techniques. Our approach will need incremental improvement, adapting and evolving our solutions as new advancements in technology become available. Our immediate next step would be to develop a more mature version of Data Whisperer that can support simple use cases internally.

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This topic was automatically opened after 10 minutes.

Could we see what this looks like? I’m curious to know if this makes things a bit easier. The flickering and freezing always annoyed me when teleporting a player.

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I’m confused, why didn’t you do a screen capture for the video meeting?

Also, I dislike subscriptions.

This feels different from the last episode.

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We still want this. This will help immersion.

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Roblox live seems like one of those things that would be useless but really neat to have regardless.

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Honestly, I would be interesting in seeing how they pulled together the Studio Web Plugins. Building a commit like webhook to format files and hopefully to serve for Unit Testing eventually, everything I’ve hit was a dead end.

The rest would be so fun to hop on a new place and mess with to see what you could do with them. Good luck team!

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where is team Emissive textures? where is team multi-cam api, better viewport frames? where is team better particle api and particle collision & shadows? where is team higher resolution textures? where is team lighting range above 60? where is team better and improved lighting? where is team hiding in-engine apis to developers? where is team better volumetric cloud api? where is team more developer access to collision and physics api? where is team surfaceappreance.color?
where is team projector api, such as the one in unity? where is team lagging behind by 20 years as an engine? where is team gui blending modes? where is team hdr? where is team global illumination? where is team geometric audio absorption? where is team server authoritative movement?

oh right, those are things people are ACTUALLY interested in… but hey, snowblox and asset & tool subscriptions right? So quirky and innovative!!!

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I’m pretty sure It’s already a thing, you just have to have the new server reserved before you teleport the players to it

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If they did all that instead, people would be saying: “Where is the seamless teleporting? Why don’t you make the marketplace better?”

They can only do so much at once. Please be patient.

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Oh yeah… poor Roblox… they can only do so much at once :sob:

Stop being so ridiculous.

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sometimes i wonder how they pull off these sometimes one time projects but don’t even have mesh texture recoloring on the roadmap

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If you just read the entire post, you wouldn’t have been so annoyed.

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It genuinely boggles me how emissive texture support of PBR and materialvariant still doesn’t exist. It couldn’t possibly be THAT hard to implement? Right??

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The main issue with adding new Roblox updates is ensuring compatibility with every platform. Roblox engineers can come up with many new features and updates quickly if needed, but they often need to spend a majority of their time patching, testing, and ensuring that it’ll be >99.99% usable for every user.

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Remember that they have to optomize everything, see if it’s actually useful, and if it’s able to be implemented with Robloxs horrible old code the website was implented on

You wouldn’t spend months on a feature for your game only for less than 20% of players to be able to use it.

Like for 4K image resolution, it’s not conpatible to users with older or mediocore devices

If you really wan’t these, go to #feature-requests to request for these


Seriously, all I’ve seen you do here is just complain about things but never actually contribute to things


Anyways, I really wan’t to see the final result for snow, it seems really interesting and would like to see if it gets implented or not

A built-in feature for something that is already made, just with scripting and extra steps is pretty nice!

I would also like Roblox Live, it seems pretty impressive actually :smiley: and would be nice to be actually implemented

I’ll tune in for the next episode of Hack Week to see the progress on everything… seems cool…

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blah blah blah
These are basic game engine features that Roblox has been lacking for years, and for years, people have been requesting them in the same channel. Hack Week is known for game-breaking innovation by Roblox employees which was cool as hell, but now Hack Week, an insight into the engine’s development, is just more corporate BS that we get everywhere else. All of the things that they’re showcasing here are merely cool-to-have features and almost completely lack innovation. They aren’t breaking any large barriers.

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Ooooo I’d kill to have this as a feature! :open_mouth:

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I kinda just like the features and the idea, like snow could already be made using scripts although having a built in one would be nice and faster.

It’s like a plugin, you can make games without it, although it’s going to be a little harder and time consuming

It’s just sayng for what he’s doing isn’t really doing much to advocate to these features, it’s like me saying whats on the screen for a reaction video

I like Hack Week and would like to see how the features evolve later in time


All Speculation:

It could also be the process that goes into making an update? It could be similar to Mojangs, just Hack Week is probably done in a faster way.

Adding one thing can possibly break somethig else

It took them ~6 years to add the ability for a game to get transferred to a profile to a group, which is fairly easy to do because it’s just transferring data one place to another


I’m excited for Episode 3 of Hack Week and would like to see what every team has been cooking up

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talking about a feature that already currently exists in the new custom materials but for some reason isn’t implemented into mesh textures or whatever even though it involves the same process but materials using roblox’s generated uv maps

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