About Simon Kozlov

Client Engine Lead at ROBLOX.

Bye Bye Bevels: The First Step Toward Our New Look

By Simon Kozlov - April 4, 2013

Last week, we notified you of some rendering changes we would be implementing in order to enhance performance while simultaneously setting the stage for our future look, which will include dynamic lighting and an updated, unified aesthetic. Today, the initial round of changes has begun. We’ve turned off bevels–they hurt performance and don’t fit our vision for the future look of ROBLOX–and shipped new rendering code that improves performance, particularly in the context of rendering static environments on slow and/or dated hardware.

Turning off bevels not only boosts performance, but also will enable us to ship dynamic lighting sooner. We’re already playing ROBLOX Battle with it turned on!

Rendering Changes and Improved Performance Are Coming Soon

By Simon Kozlov - March 27, 2013

Next week, we’ll be releasing new rendering code that will boost performance by up to 3X, enabling more people to play games that have tens of thousands of parts. Part of the performance boost will stem from turning off bevels, which round the corners of bricks. The rest will come from featherweight parts and fast parts technology applying to ROBLOX parts of all shapes, sizes and materials, and a dynamic quality adjustment sensor that automatically adjusts material quality based on your hardware. The following video demonstrates the performance differences in a place that has over a hundred thousand parts.

Prototyping the Future Look of ROBLOX Part 2

By Simon Kozlov - January 12, 2013

A few months back, we showed off some prototype videos that detailed what the future look of ROBLOX might be. We discovered a lot of interesting facets of our platform and took many of those tidbits of knowledge with us moving forward. Previous designs have taught us a lot about what we think could make ROBLOX look great in the future (particularly our growing understanding of lighting and shadows). Our previous ideas for our future look featured extremely realistic parts that required some serious computational lifting, and we wanted ensure that mobile devices, like the iPad (or any other mobile device we develop for in the future), would be able to handle the load. These new visual prototypes reflect our efforts to drastically alter the appearance of ROBLOX in way that’s smooth and playable on any device.

Featherweight Parts: One Million Parts, One ROBLOX World

By Simon Kozlov - December 21, 2012

Featherweight parts, despite their name, have nothing to do with feathers, flying or anything bird-related. They do, however, have a lot to do with weight: while old ROBLOX parts are “heavy” memory users, featherweight parts are “super light,” allowing us to load and render more of them with the same computing power. The first iteration of featherweight parts has now released for ROBLOX on all platforms and it has already proven revolutionary in some ROBLOX places.

Shadows on ROBLOX: Past, Present, and Future

By Simon Kozlov - October 3, 2012

We got the chance to sit down and chat with Simon Kozlov, Client Engine Lead for ROBLOX, about the implementation of shadows, how they came to be, and where he hopes they go in the future. What do you have for us, Simon?

People take shadows for granted. The placement of shadows on 3D models is integral for your brain and eyes to understand how large something is, how heavy it is, and how close or far away it is from you, just to name a few things. So creating realistic shadows in ROBLOX is very important to us.

RGC 2012: Prototyping the Future Look of ROBLOX

By Simon Kozlov - July 18, 2012

Over the past several months, Client Engine Lead Simon Kozlov has been working on some prototype videos that showcase the potential look of ROBLOX in the future. He shared them at ROBLOX Game Conference 2012, and now we’re showing them to the community at large. It’s important to note that these videos are prototypes and there is no projected release date, but the differences are staggering.

“We spent a lot of time talking about what kind of look is right look for ROBLOX,” said Kozlov. “We looked at a lot of different types of effects to determine what works and what doesn’t.”

The end result is an impressive blend of effects, combining photo-realistic textures and lighting with the aesthetic ROBLOX users are familiar with. ROBLOX has always been a virtual toy, of sorts, but these prototype videos show the pieces to build worlds could one day have a more realistic appearance.

ROBLOX Users: An Essential Part of Our Development Team

By Simon Kozlov - April 19, 2012

We recently explained our extensive testing infrastructure and showed how various systems are checking ROBLOX’s code for errors and regressions at just about all hours of every day.

But get this: that wasn’t the full picture.

ROBLOX also has an experienced community of user testers, who round out our otherwise mechanized testing platform with good, old-fashioned – but no less vital – human interaction, and usually learn a few things in the process.