ROBLOX introduces new Dynamic Lighting engine

ROBLOX, the popular social gaming site that encourages user-based creation has released a new lighting and shadow engine this week called Dynamic Lighting. When all is said and done, the innovative new technology will be able to light the millions of user-generated worlds that are currently available on the platform, and enable many users to look at ROBLOX in a completely different light.

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ROBLOX, the popular social gaming site that encourages user-based creation has released a new lighting and shadow engine this week called Dynamic Lighting. When all is said and done, the innovative new technology will be able to light the millions of user-generated worlds that are currently available on the platform, and enable many users to look at ROBLOX in a completely different light.

The Dynamic Lighting engine will use volumetric pixels (also known as “voxels”) to create more dynamic-looking shadows, which are updated in real-time, and with little to no noticeable lag. The reason for the engine’s smooth performance is that all of the technical behind-the-scenes stuff is going on in the user’s CPU, rather than the computer’s graphics card. So if I come along and destroy one of your preciously-built buildings in your game world, then I am going to see every brick fly off the structure with perfect and accurate shadows completely intact and in real-time.

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What this means for ROBLOX users is that their latest game worlds just got a whole lot more visual and creative. In short, players and creators will now not only be able to control their own ambient light and shadow effects, but also place customizable light sources for a variety of visual and gameplay interactions. The Dynamic Lighting engine will increase the visual depth of each and every game world without sacrificing the actual gameplay or performance, whether you want to make “realistic cave-exploration games and night-time police chase simulators,” or “dramatic sunset vistas and haunted mansions.

ROBLOX is currently the home to millions of user-created worlds and games. In fact, 99% of the content that you’ll find on the site is completely user created, and the team behind the social platform believes in this new lighting technology so much that they even went as far as to file a patent for it. So whether you’re a regular ROBLOX user or not, you can certainly be sure to see more of this Dynamic Lighting in your social games going forward.

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You can see all of the light and shadowy action at work in the two select untouched screenshots included in this article. And in the meantime, Dynamic Lighting support is also being worked on for the service’s mobile iOS app, ROBLOX Mobile.