On the Origin of Roblox’s Rendering

ROBLOX was not built from scratch. It relies on several libraries and engines to achieve what it does: in 2007, these were the FMOD sound system, Lua 5.0, Scintilla (the program used for writing and editing scripts in-studio), and the Graphics3D innovation engine by Morgan Mcguire, aka “G3D”.

The most important one here is G3D.

G3D is made to allow for better ease of use with OpenGL when programming in C++. It has built-in skybox, sun, lens flare, and simple UI functionality implemented, which ROBLOX made full use of when G3D was used as the primary rendering method, from 2003 to 2007, and when G3D was available as an option, from 2007 to 2010.

ROBLOX’s default skybox from 2003-2009 was lifted directly from the G3D demo, with ROBLOX relying on version 6.09 from ~2007-2010.

And there you have it, a simple explanation of ROBLOX’s legacy rendering system.

But that’s not the interesting part.

Since you can still find all the G3D versions on sourceforge, and since we now know enough about how ROBLOX functioned from 2004-2005 through nearly a year of research from the patents and mcguire’s 3 color screenshots, we here at the clientsearch decided it would be feasible (and fun) to create a functioning replica of roblox using G3D.

So that’s what we’ve been doing.

To start off with, we’ve been sourcing as much information as we can find. There are 5 color screenshots of roblox from 2004-2005, with 2 being from 2004 and the other 3 being from 2005.

There are also 18 black and white screenshots of ROBLOX sourced from the original patents, with 5 being screenshots of the properties of various instances and 13 being screenshots of the actual 3D editor.

Morgan McGuire’s 3 color screenshots are the most high-quality, and from them we were able to make pixel-perfect measurements of the original UI.

There were also two very low-res screenshots from 2004, giving a glimpse of a version of ROBLOX with a much simpler UI, though far too low-res to be used as a basis.

From all these screenshots, we have begun making our rebuild.

And it’s been going smoothly.

While features like surfaces, physics, shadows, and the toolbox are still unfinished, what we have now has a lot of promise for future development.

We even have a github!

Stay tuned for further updates.

-DirtPiper