Why we want 2007 so badly

Throughout the various iterations of ROBLOX, features have come and gone: Custom Meshes were removed, then readded, PlayerGui was added, Controller was removed, etc. While all of the features I have listed have been documented, not all were so lucky to be recorded before they were removed - two big ones being DHTML and OpenGL Stable/Legacy.

The first one, DHTML, has almost no documentation, with it only being mentioned by ROBLOX themselves 3 times and the wiki pages pertaining to it having been long since removed. What does remain of DHTML are a handful of scripts available through free models that used DHTML before its removal. So, what was DHTML?

DHTML was implemented through two instances: HtmlService and HtmlWindow. Scripts could call a function called :NewWindow() on HtmlService and create an HtmlWindow. Through the function :setBody(), one could have the Window load a block of Html, or they could use :navigate() to have the window load a URL. The HtmlWindow itself was a seperate window that opened, similar to the old help menu. Certain games used DHTML for shops, tutorials, intros, et cetera, with a famous example being Clockwork’s “Dodge the Teapots of doom.” DHTML was used by game creators as GUIs are used now, and when they were removed people were not pleased. The :NewWindow() function of HtmlService was locked, trying to insert an HtmlWindow would crash the game, and the two instances were left in as deprecated shells of their former selves up until June of 2008. DHTML was removed for making it too easy for people to exploit, though the exact incident that prompted its removal is unknown. DHTML, despite barely being mentioned by ROBLOX at all, was apparently important enough of a feature that people complained for years after it was removed - most of the information I could find about it was forum posts from 2008-2011 by nostalgic users.

The second one is much less elusive: OpenGL Stable, which was ROBLOX’s default rendering engine from 2005-2007, and remained an option (renamed as OpenGL Legacy in 2009) until 2010. OpenGL Stable was the only rendering engine ROBLOX has ever had that supported AntiAliasing, and handled the shading of round objects much better than Direct3D.

OpenGL Stable also has support for a few other features which are now useless, such as the “shiny” and “specular” properties of decals and textures. OpenGL also supported shadows, however by 2008 the ability to enable them was (most likely unintentionally) removed: the decision to change the way shadows were enabled in settings from a checkbox to a menu made it so OpenGL couldn’t tell if shadows were enabled or not, so they always defaulted to “off.” From what we can see by looking at screenshots of roblox from 2006-2007, OpenGL Stable with shadows was something truly beautiful.

Both of these features will remain forever as nothing more than words on a blog post unless we can find a working 2007 client - and that is why we are so hell-bent on finding one.