Are using our new package overrides feature, and they're local to these instances. Now, spring is here and we want the scene to feel warmer, so let's make the lights white. We're going to melt the snow on the rooftop just a little bit. Because we want it to apply to all houses, we're going to publish to the package. With auto-update on, all the houses are going to get the melted snow and the white lights. But notice, and here's the interesting part, the overrides on the first two houses are still intact. The first house still has the lights. Package overrides coming later this year. Woo. All right. This is the one you've been asking for. Branch and merge is coming natively to Roblox Studio. Let's see a demo. All right. Let's say I want to change this fort without getting in my team's way.
I'm going to create a branch. Let's call it environment changes. Now I'm going to be in my own branch. You're going to see in the bottom left corner of Studio. Now, let's make a series of updates in this branch. I'm going to make the paint red. Let's change the banners to red as well. I'll lower the towers a little bit, and let's close the gate. Because the gate is closed, let's just get rid of those barricades in the front. We don't need them anymore. All right. Now that I'm done, let's switch back to the main branch. While it's gone, seems like Jason here made it nighttime. Nice touch, by the way, but he also made my banners blue. I just made them red. What are we going to do? Typically, this is where things get tough for our teams, right?
Luckily, now I can merge my branch back into main. Voila. Merge is complete, and Studio shows me everything in the viewport, like the towers that I lowered and the features that I turned red. Also, it shows me details on Explorer on the right, a blue dot for every change, and a red minus for all the removals. I can also filter down to just the conflicts. In this case, I guess I'll go with your blue banners, so I'm going to resolve it by selecting the current branch. When I'm done, I can hit Complete, and there. It has both sets of changes. Okay. We know that real-world merges can get much more complicated. So we want to get this into your hands early next year for some feedback.
Also, every action that I just showed you are backed by APIs, meaning you can use it with your agentic workflows from day one.
That is awesome, Eric. I really, really like that feature, and I really like that blue banner, so thanks for keeping it. Now I would like to talk about some new intelligent tools that will amplify your creativity and accelerate building your game. Studio's 3D generation tools allow you to go from an idea to a working model in minutes. Let's look at an example. Say I want to create a windmill and I have a specific style in mind.
I will type generate mesh and add a detailed prompt. Studio will suggest some part names. These look great. I will adjust the bounding box to control the size and placement before hitting Generate. I then get a preview with some images to review. I think I like this one, so I will select it and confirm. After a few minutes, here we are. I have got it in my scene.
Now let's check the Explorer. We have a base, blades, and foundation. Segmenting the mesh allows us to easily add behavior to this model. Now let's bring it to life. I will prompt to make the blades spin, and when it is finished, I can hit play and see it in action in my scene. It is that easy. But what if you have an existing model that you would like to update?
To help with this, we are releasing a new tool for texture generation that builds on our previous beta. Let's go back to our windmill example. Say I changed my mind, and I now want it to be made of stone. I just click on the texture tool in the ribbon, add a prompt, and choose a reference image. Now, as we saw earlier, this model contains multiple mesh parts, and after a few seconds, all of the textures are updated.
Now, when in the scene, right-click and choose Generate Texture and add a prompt. This time we will use 4K PBR, and we will add a prompt to make it look old and rusty. The generation happens in parallel, and after a few minutes, everything is updated. There we go. We have got some rusty tools. That looks great. Now let's talk about terrain. As you heard from George this morning, we have some exciting new tools in development that will make it easier than ever to build the world you imagine.
Earlier this year, we kicked off the Terrain Early Access Program, and the first feature we introduced was custom terrain materials. You can now create up to 64 unique materials for your game, allowing you to add variation and create natural or even unnatural-looking environments. This is just the start. We are also adding native support for terrain paths in Studio.
Say we want to connect this road up to our fort. You simply draw a spline and the engine modifies the terrain to conform to the path. You can move spline points and instantly see the results in Studio, and the path you create are smooth, so it is really easy to build roads with proper collision behavior. Finally, we are adding support for projected decals. This will allow you to add visual detail by layering images directly onto the terrain surface. You can easily move and resize the decals to get the look you want, and they are low cost, so you can add as many as you need to your game. You can see from this before and after just how much depth they add to this scene.
That is awesome, Jason. Give it up. We also know that building an ambitious game is going to require powerful testing workflows. Let us walk through the future of testing in Roblox Studio. We are going to begin by starting a testing session. Right away, I can now see both sides of my game, client and server. Previously, this meant juggling multiple Studios, but not anymore. For example, I can do an action on a client, like ringing this bell, and I can see the gates open in server view right next to it. There is more. What if you want to test multiple clients? Well, soon, without restarting Studio, I can just add another client. Yes. If that is not enough, let us just go add another one. All without restarting Studio. You can also control each of them independently.
When it is done, I can just stop the debugger like normal, and that is the goal, right? Your whole game in front of you all at once, keeping you in the creative flow. Coming very soon. Nice. Thank you. Couple more things, but something else. Let us say I want to check a bug that seems to only happen on your real device. Right now, your option is to grab your phone and launch the Roblox app.
Then you are going to lose access to all your beloved Studio tools. I think we can do better here. We are going to start another testing session. This time, I am going to have another option. Soon, your real device can connect to Team Test directly. This is a recording from my iPhone. I am going to click Join Test here, and now my phone is connected to the same server that Studio is.
You see both players moving. That is not all. We are also going to be adding support for remote debugging. Let us debug this green flag right here. I can go find the line of code. Let us set the breakpoint. Then back on my phone, I am going to trigger Capture the Flag. Then the Studio stops right on that line. Because I am in Studio, you are going to get access to all your Studio tools, like the Watch window where I can see all your script variables. When we are done, we can hit Resume, and the client will keep going. The flag goes up, confetti comes down, mission completed. We are excited to get this for early preview to you later this year. One more thing, and I know this one has been on your wish list.
This is the same Team Test session from before with the client and server view open. I am about to do something that has never been possible. Soon, you will be able to test teleports directly in Studio. Let us go. There it is, coming early next year.
That's the future of Studio. Improved creation, iteration, and testing for teams at any scale. Come by the Studio booth to learn more, and thank you very much.
Thank you.
Please welcome Roblox Senior Director of Product, Robert Melly, Senior Manager of Product Design, Shiu Pei Luu, and Senior Director of Engineering, Oren Jacob. Good. Sweet. Then step up.
Thank you, Jason and Eric. It's exciting to see Studio evolve to support more expansive worlds. Hi, I'm Rob. I'm joined by Oren and Shiu Pei, and together we're the leads of the Avatar team. Our mission on Avatar is to help you populate those worlds. We want life to find a way into every nook and cranny of your game, and we want this for a very simple reason. It's because populated worlds are fun. They're fun for users to explore and interact with, and they're fun for creators to make as you realize your vision on the platform. We're going to talk today about a range of technology that we're bringing to bear on this problem, and this technology will fall into three core themes. The first is many. We want there to be many characters.
We want armies and cities and towns, many characters in all the genres that they enable. If you are going to fill your world with many characters, they had better be sure that we respect creator intent while automating away the boredom. Finally, we are pushing forward the technological capability of the Roblox platform, making things possible that are not possible today, so that you can make your worlds and your characters look great. Let us dive in. First up, we are going to talk about many. If you have built worlds with many characters on Roblox, you know that a really important thing to consider is the underlying scalability of the engine, and we agree. This is why we have invested heavily in it in 2026, and will continue to over the course of the next year. Let us look at some of the things that we are building.
First up, we have the Character Controller Library, or the CCL. The CCL is a Luau-based replacement for the humanoid that we first shipped in April of this year. We shipped a V2 yesterday, and a V3 will come by the end of this year. Writing this code in Luau has a lot of nice properties, but the best one is that it scales really well. If you chart the compute cost of characters running humanoid against characters running the CCL, you get a chart that looks kind of like this. The reason CCL can scale so well is that it only does the work it has to do. If you have a character on the other side of the world, or you have a character that is idling, milling around, not doing much of anything, the CCL will no longer simulate it.
You can throw as many characters as you want at us, we will scale under the hood. Our second area of investment is just the continual optimization of our core avatar stack. Across the course of this year, we have walked through this stack, we have identified bottlenecks, and we have eliminated them for all experiences on all platforms. We paid special attention this year to removing fast cluster invalidations and ensuring layered clothing fits very, very quickly. This is an area where we welcome your feedback. Any ideas you have or challenges you are facing on production, please let us know and we are happy to remove them from the platform. Our final investment in the core scalability of avatars is bringing our SLIM stack to avatars. SLIM replaces heavyweight mesh, texture, and data model representations of content with lightweight proxies.
In this simulated scene, you can see that using SLIM, we can reduce the number of triangles drawn to the screen by 93% and the amount of memory consumed by 60%. We first shipped SLIM for R15 avatars in May, and we have two big upgrades coming. The first is that you can apply SLIM to NPC characters in addition to player avatars, and the second is that your SLIM representation will regenerate if the avatar changes what it has equipped. Across the board, we are investing in the core scalability of the engine, making sure that no matter how many characters you throw at us, everything works performantly on all platforms. To talk about how you are going to make all those characters, I am going to hand it off to Shiu Pei.
Thanks, Rob. Hi, everyone. My name is Shiu Pei, and I am on design and creative here at Roblox. When we say easy to make, what we mean is we want to eliminate that creation tax for you all while protecting your craft. Let's jump into one of our premier tools and talk about what that looks like. Avatar Auto Setup. Many of you are familiar with this. It's pretty easy and straightforward, right. Take a 3D model, drop it in, run a plug-in, voilà, you have a Roblox-ready asset. However, we've heard some of your feedback. Bit of a black box. You'd like a little bit more control, but you love the speed. We hear you, and we couldn't agree more. What you're going to see over the next couple of months, as well as beyond, is restoring creative control. We're decoupling auto setup into modular backend services.
The accessibility will remain the same. You're still going to be able to access this all via Studio, and you can also plug in these APIs into your own custom workflows. This is the best of both worlds. Automation when you want it, manual overrides when you expect it. If we are talking about easy to make, transparency has to be part of that conversation. Based off of your feedback, we've added some beta features that will be streamlining your work processes. First one, visual inspection. It's great to get UGC validation warnings, but it's nice to be able to inspect those visually, whether it's a head, a body, clothing, or accessory. Just making it easier for you to fix the problems that arise is extremely important. Second, mesh island enforcement.
You've asked for it, and we believe that it is important that we provide this, as it promotes predictable and fair avatar behavior, not just for players, but also for our creators. We're here to help you catch those issues early and build confidence in what you're building. UGC validation, fantastic, but it also assumes that you already have a 3D asset. What if you're a 2D creator who loves to ideate and design and draw on something like Procreate or Photoshop? What happens? We're really excited to announce one of our new features that's coming by the end of this year, Prompt to Avatar. Let's take it for a spin. Rob and Oren have invited me to design a medieval game with them, and I'm going to concept out a character for them that we can get into prototype quickly.
Shared a little bit about what I think our character should look like. Cool space buns, great armor, but I think her hair should be blue. Let's do some quick edits. Again, this is a fast way for us to prototype together to see how this can work. She's looking pretty great. I love the blue hair. Let's generate. At this point, I want to explain a little what's automagically happening for you. It's rapid. It means what you're getting out of this is a compliant avatar mesh, a dynamic R15 plus rig, separated layer clothing, and you're also automatically getting those pesky modesty layers that can be sometimes hard to generate. An edit right before you publish. This is great and all, but let's see what she looks like once in-game. Here she is. We're going to inspect.
Rob and Oren and I can play through, and we can see what we might want to tweak. I can already see some things I would like to change. You can also imagine a future where I can upload my actual sketched 2D concepts as well as 3D models and iterate directly. AI, again, should amplify your vision, never replace your artistry. We've talked about some of these rapid workflows, and we've talked about how we're powering creators, but let's also talk about what this means for the broader platform. We've heard it from our players, bringing creator power directly to players is also extremely important, and in-experience creation is one of those examples in which we do it. So far, there's already been massive adoption. You all have done an amazing job of integrating in-experience creation into your work.
1.7 million items have been created since last year's release. This is great. It's so fun to see all of the things that our players are making. Self-expression is undeniable on our platform, regardless of if you're a creator or a player. Once again, our promise to you is we'll continue to build these acceleration tools for whether you're a concept artist or a developer. What we need to ensure, though, is we are offering you the ability to meet your creative quality bar while also ensuring your unique fingerprint is there. Up next, my colleague Oren is going to talk about breathing life into these characters and making sure that they look great.
Thanks, Shiu Pei. Now let's talk about raising the ceiling of avatars, NPCs, and characters, and how they look, move, and behave. AAA quality on Roblox. A longstanding gap in quality in Roblox has been the expressiveness of our characters. This year, we've executed a full-court press on the motion and animation stack of avatars. Advanced avatars add real articulation, 15 joints per hand, five in the torso, clavicles, balls of the feet. The platform avatars now support full-body animation, including articulated hands and fingers. Adaptive animation also supports retargeting across rigs in both directions. Coming soon, twist bones. There it is. Yeah, I'm excited about that. To the animation editing flows, we're bringing multiple characters and the ability to animate any property in your scene into one shared timeline built from the ground up for expressive animation, including cutscenes and cinematics. Yeah, here we go.
We're building on that with state machines, root motion matching, and more character-related motion tooling all to come. You'll soon be able to describe motion through prompts or videos and get back game-ready animation. We're also bringing AI upres to existing R15 and R6 animations with hands and faces coming in the future. That's right. There it is. Okay. Here's a view of layered clothing and accessories today versus where we're going. Notice the difference. On the left, everything's kind of approximately correct, but on the right, it actually fits properly. This is where we're taking clothing and accessories on Roblox to mimic the real world. Hats that stay flexible where they're over the head and rigid in the brim in front. Patterns, check out the plaid on the trench coat, now hold their structure instead of stretching and warping. Coming soon.
We are also adding the ability for avatars to interact with objects in the world around them. When you pick up a thing like a coffee cup, you gain the ability to take a drink. You pick up a baseball or a tomato, and you can throw it. We are going to provide a default set of abilities that work with objects out of the box, and creators will be able to extend that to deliver all kinds of exciting, unique interactions for their games. I personally am very excited to share this all with you. We are going to tie this all together now. It is time to move the default avatar movement on the platform forward. We are introducing two new foundational technologies here, motion matching and root motion, which will be available generically on the platform.
We are using them both along with Animation Graphs and our new platform schema and all the other things in this talk to deliver, there it is, this super exciting quality of motion which will become the default in all templates soon. There is one more thing I am excited to share with you, that avatar creation in Roblox has come a long way from flat textures to PBR materials. Last week we took the next step, emissive support for UGC avatar items. Emissives let specific parts of item glow on their own in any lighting. If you are a game dev and the glow doesn't work in your experience, there is a single toggle in avatar settings, turn that off. It is live in the marketplace for every eligible creator right now. Enjoy, and go make something that glows.
I also want to share with you all about that hoodie that you might have seen last week, perhaps online. Every developer here at RDC is getting a virtual emissive RDC 2026 shirt in their inventory next week. Yeah. Come talk to us at the avatar booth. Thank you.
All right.
All right. Let's go.
Please welcome Roblox Senior Director of Product, Josh Anon, and Senior Director of Engineering, Taylor Russ.
Hi, I'm Taylor, an engineer on the engine.
We have something even better, cool new features.
Dave talked this morning about bringing the walls down to play. We are focused on two key themes for the Roblox engine to support this. The first is increasing the range and reach of the content that you can build, and the second is improving the fidelity. Let's dive in, starting with the range of content first.
In-game creation has enabled a whole genre of games on Roblox that would never be possible anywhere else. Even with all the recent CSG performance improvements in features like EditableMesh, there are still two painful hurdles for these types of games. The first is persistence. Creation experiences are some of the stickiest games on the platform. If you want your players to save what they create,
You have to make a bespoke solution.
Native persistence for in-game content is coming soon. Just like DataStore allows you to persist key value data, you will soon be able to persist arbitrary models and even raw images and meshes that were created within your game. Nice. Thank you. You get back an asset ID just like any other asset, but these assets are owned by and scoped to your game.
All right. We have solved persistence for creation games. Safety is the other major challenge. Earlier this year, we started shutting down servers automatically when we detected policy-violating content like a crude avatar. The system has already caught and shut down more than 1.8 million game servers. This has made Roblox safer, but it has hurt innocent players, disrupting their games, and it has put innocent creators like you in a really tricky spot. We have been holding you and your game responsible for the actions of bad players without providing you any way to hold those players accountable.
We want to do better. We are adding an API to bring you into the loop so that you can take action to clean up bad content before we shut down the server. With the safety callback API, you could register for a callback in a server script that will allow you to run code whenever our real-time moderation systems are triggered. For example, if we detect inappropriate content, rather than an immediate server shutdown, you will receive the callback. You then have a chance to remove the bad content or bad actor while giving good users a smooth and safe experience. Stop by our breakout session for in-game creation tomorrow to learn more about this new API.
See, we promised you cool new features. How about some more? Another way that we are working to expand the range of content possible is by continuing to invest in competitive gaming. Earlier this year, we shipped Server Authority, and we are already seeing games like Global Anarchy adopt it to take advantage of complex coordinated physics and more fair gameplay. We will be iterating on it this year, making it more performant and easier to code with. Come by the breakout session to learn more.
We want to go even further to stop cheaters, like this actual Roblox cheater captured in the wild you see pictured behind me here. A key part of our vision for anti-cheat is to put the power firmly back in your hands, giving you the final say on your game security. For years, we have provided APIs like Ban and Kick to let you take action and APIs like IsVerified to let you know who to take action on. We will soon be adding a device integrity API where we leverage hardware-level security to tell you if you can trust the device the user is playing on. You will be able to do things like have a competitive server for only verified users who are using trusted hardware. Thank you. Thanks.
We partnered with Roblox Rivals recently to run an experiment where we didn't allow low-integrity Android devices to play, and we found that this alone reduced cheating prevalence by 97% on Android. We'll ship this API soon with support for Android and our web player, and then we'll expand to all other platforms.
Do you all like the disclaimer on this slide? I know our legal team sure did. Just kidding, I love our legal team. Making sure you're not playing with cheaters is important to a fun round, but playing with the right players is critical, too. We're introducing two new primitives that will let you do queue-based matchmaking and much more. The first is a queue service. This is a way to create queues with as many players as you want. Then we have a system that will trigger the second new primitive compute functions to run on the queue. Compute functions are a lightweight way to do processing in the cloud related to your game, but not specific to any server instance. For queue-based matchmaking, you would use the compute function to teleport players into the right rounds.
Queues and compute functions are really flexible and can be used for a lot more. Things like global auction houses become easy with them. We're aiming to start an early access program for these early next year.
Let's talk about an entirely new category of games that we're enabling on Roblox. Casual games like puzzles, match threes, and even some strategy games. I'm guessing that many of you have games like this installed on your iPhone right now and play them regularly. To animated image, orthographic camera, and more. Let's take a minute to go deeper. I want to highlight that these features are not specific to these genres. They'll work for any type of game and beyond. For example, an orthographic camera is also useful for a modeling plug-in in Studio.
You all have firsthand experience with how easy it is to build live multiplayer games in Roblox. We are improving our support for turn-based multiplayer games. In particular, you need to know when it is your turn. We are improving notifications. Developers will be able to send push notifications to players who opt in. We are adding scheduled notification support for events, and we are adjusting our frequency limits. If a player taps on a notification, your limit resets.
Something I am really excited about is the ability to play Roblox games offline. We are not ready to share API details just yet, but conceptually it involves two key pieces. First, we are changing the ability to securely adding the ability to securely download a game and its assets together. Second, we are changing how the game server works by splitting it into two parts. One part is the gameplay server that has your gameplay logic. The other is a back-end server that always runs in the cloud and runs scripts for things like purchasing. The gameplay server will be either able to run in the cloud like today or locally on device. If you put all of this together and for any downloaded game built this way, you can play offline.
A key use case we are excited about is to make it easy to add offline single-player campaigns to existing multiplayer games, reusing most of your code as is. You can prepare for this by splitting your server code into scripts that are pure gameplay and scripts that need to stay on the server.
One big challenge with offline play is what do you do about player data? What do you do when you cannot access a network? Adding offline support with DataStore today would involve queuing up transactions and then sending them when the user reconnects. That is tricky to get right. Data Stores are powerful in their simplicity, but that also means that things beyond the basics can feel like they require being a database expert.
We are introducing a higher-level system called Player Data Store to simplify player data management for a ton of use cases. It automatically handles transaction management, session locking, schemas, and more. It will also handle right to be forgotten requests for you automatically. It will simplify working with player data when a user is playing offline. Behind the scenes, we will handle everything for you. We are aiming for early access by the end of the year.
Finally, as Nick highlighted this morning, we're adding multiple visual features, from features like UI blur to native sprite sheet support, which lets you easily create visuals like you see in this game.
We think all of these features will let you build new types of gameplay never seen on Roblox before. Now, let's shift gears a bit and talk about increasing the fidelity of your content. To cover that, I'll invite the amazing, unparalleled dynamic duo, George and Varun, up to stage.
Hey, everyone. I'm Varun, and I work on Product and Engine.
I'm George. I work on engineering and engine. Let's dive into what we've been working on to increase the fidelity of all your content on Roblox.
Content on Roblox is made up of a variety of building blocks. As you know, they can range from primitive shapes to meshes and textures, to terrain, PBR materials, and even collision geometry. We refer to this entire spectrum as digital matter.
Our goal is to expand this toolset of foundational building blocks to give you the freedom to build content however you want, in whatever style. Let's start with the most basic building block, primitive shapes.
Today we have sphere, block, wedge and corner wedge, and cylinder. These five shapes have served us well over all these years, but it's time we've added a few more. We're bringing three new primitives to Roblox. Cone, capsule, and disc. Finally. These new primitives will allow you to build with a richer set while supporting highly performant and fully analytical collisions. That's not all. To give you even more control, we're also expanding the family to include rounded versions of each primitive. We'll start releasing these new primitives later this year, and we hope this will help cut down on some tedious workarounds that you guys do today, all while expanding what you can create. Remember, these will also be available in Build or through your favorite AI agent.
Cool. Primitives are cool, but the majority of content on Roblox is made up of meshes and textures. Earlier today, I shared how scalability technologies like texture streaming changed the game for all existing content. Here's the exciting part. These technologies not only lift the existing content, but also give you the freedom to push both on the variety and the fidelity of the assets that you have without worrying about a strict memory budget. Let's take a look at a specific example.
Driving Empire has been a staple on the platform since 2019. They have got incredible-looking cars and a massive open world to drive around in and explore. Performance and stability has always been a top priority for them, so they have had strict self-imposed texture and mesh budgets for all their content. They have been looking closely at texture streaming, mesh streaming, and SLIM, and here is an early look at how they are planning to use all that extra freedom to push the boundaries of immersiveness and fidelity in their world. Shall we roll the video, George?
Let's do it. That is so cool. That's so cool. I love it. It's so exciting. Let's dive deeper into what's going on there. On the left, you see the gas station that Driving Empire couldn't release because it didn't meet their quality bar. On the right, you can see what removing those budget constraints can do. They are free to create while their players always get the smooth experience.
George, those snacks look great, but Driving Empire is all about the cars.
Right.
These licensed assets can be up to 200,000 triangles each. The team has never been able to LOD them because of how tedious it would be to meet the high-quality requirements of their licensing partners. With the new mesh streaming system and improved cloud LODs, all meshes in Driving Empire can now have fully automated LODs that are streamed in with imperceptible transitions, including the cars. Shall we take a look under the hood, George?
My goodness, Varun. Harmony looks at the device's capability and sets a strict memory budget. The debug view on the left shows the system automatically picking the best LOD for each mesh while adhering to that budget every single frame. As the camera moves closer, higher-quality LODs are swapped in, and all these transitions are invisible to the player, as you can see on the video on the right. Driving Empire is now free to add more detail to the rest of their world without worrying about the triangle budget from their cars. Make sure to stop by the mesh and texture streaming breakout session tomorrow, where we will dive into a lot more technical details.
Finally, Driving Empire is a large open world and leverages instance streaming heavily. Without SLIM, they have had to resort to a custom LOD system and author all their buildings three times at different detail levels. Now, with SLIM, they can simply author the high-fidelity version of all new content once and let SLIM do all the heavy lifting. Driving Empire is now even evaluating if they can deprecate their custom LOD system completely and just use SLIM for everything.
Even with all this new technology. Yeah, it's cool. Even with all this new tech, we know that getting it all to work together can still feel clunky at times, but we're determined to keep improving that. One example of that is draw distance. Today, on low-end devices, the engine reduces the draw distance all the way down to 200 studs to maintain performance. This can make your game feel small, and in some cases, it can even be game-breaking. With the strong foundation of these technologies that we talked about, the engine's now able to scale well enough automatically. We're excited to announce that we will be increasing the minimum draw distance to 500 studs. That's cool. This means that even on low-end Android devices that might be running at quality level one, you'll get more than double today's draw distance of 200.
At higher quality levels, draw distance and other quality settings like lighting and shadows will ramp up more aggressively as well. This is already rolling out to devices today, so keep an eye out on the dev forum over the next few weeks, and we will go into a lot more details.
Now let's talk about collision fidelity. When you import a new mesh or model, the engine gives you four options today for collisions. While this gives you some control, finding the right balance between precision and performance can be a frustrating process of trial and error. I'm sure many of you have stared at this exact debug view, agonizing over this process. I know I have, George.
Don't worry, Varun. We've got a whole new approach to collision geometry. First, let's turn on the new debug view mode. This new mode lets you overlay the collisions directly on the part. Next, we've been working on a new algorithm to generate collision geometry that gets much better results. This new Voronoi-based convex decomposition algorithm automatically selects the sweet spot between the performance and precision based on the input mesh. If you're not happy with the final result, you can now tweak things on a more granular level. This lets you smoothly trade off performance for precision while seeing the results in near real-time in Studio. This new approach will be available in the next few weeks, so look out on the dev forum for more information as well.
I'm especially excited about that one.
Yeah.
Okay, moving on. Let's talk more about terrain. In Dave's keynote, you saw the quality bar we are aiming for. Unlocking that level of fidelity requires three key ingredients that we're adding to the engine. Let's dig in more into each one. I'm going to keep these coming. First is the surface of your terrain. I've painted some dots here of snow in the foreground. Keep an eye on that as the video plays through. Terrain today works using a voxel grid. I specify the material on each voxel, and the engine then does its best to paint in the surface and then blend in the transitions. Now, as the camera zooms out, notice how we've lost all that detail. Those three dots have completely disappeared. This is because the visual resolution of the surface is coupled to the voxel resolution.
Similarly, in the distance in those peaks, all you see is a blurry mess. We are completely revamping terrain by introducing virtual texture. Those three dots of snow are now much higher fidelity because of VT. With VT, we can finally decouple the visual resolution from the stored voxel resolution. We do this by maintaining a completely separate virtual texture that is then mapped onto those same voxels. To optimize performance and memory, only the portion of the texture that is currently visible is generated on the fly and then at all distances, as well as some of the non-destructive tooling you saw earlier, like stamp decals and spline-based paths.
Yeah. Next is the shape of your terrain. Our current terrain system uses voxel occupancy for meshing. If you take a closer look, you can see the staircasing along the slopes and the jagged edges on the peaks. Let's see what this looks like with the new terrain system.
Are you ready, George?
Yeah.
Three, two, one.
Ooh.
Ah, so much better.
Yeah. That is cool. Can we see that again, Varun?
Yeah. Let us look at it again. Okay, so this is the old one. This is it.
Yeah, that is a lot better.
Way better.
Yeah. Very cool. Beneath the surface, we are transitioning to signed distance fields. This allows you to create terrain with a higher level of precision that truly preserves your artistic intent. The staircasing is gone, and you can now see a lot more detail in every contour.
Finally, even if your terrain is textured well and has the exact shape you want, a bare terrain surface can still feel so empty. We are building a fully customizable scattering system. First, you specify where the object should show up on the terrain. Then you can set broad rules like density, footprint, orientation, and scale. Finally, the engine takes over and then scatters rocks or bushes or whatever else you might need across the whole surface. For this alpine scene, I have got a few variations of pine trees that I want to scatter. Let us bring those in. Everything is non-destructive, so you can go back and change things, and you can always hand place more specific detail whenever you might want tighter control. This could be for gameplay reasons.
Since all of this is purely visual additional detail, the engine can easily optimize and scale them across the spectrum of devices that we support without breaking your games. That is Terrain. To learn more, make sure to check out the breakout session right after this keynote. That way.
Okay. To round things off, we wanted to quickly touch on materials. Six years ago, we introduced PBR on Roblox, and last year we introduced emissive masks here at RDC. Even with these improvements, our current physically based shading model still falls short when it comes to things like skin, car paint, and fabrics.
That's right. We think we can do better. Here is an early preview of improvements we are making to how materials react to light. These improvements allow us to better model complex surfaces like skin on this avatar. Remember, this is running on Roblox Engine today. Capturing how light penetrates the surface paired with greater control over specular reflections really pushes the fidelity you can achieve with this avatar. These technologies are not novel, but the true difficulty lies in ensuring that they can scale gracefully across all the devices that we support while still preserving your artistic intent. We hope to get this out to the community through an early access program by the end of this year. Keep an eye out on the dev forum for more information.
While we are making improvements to our shading models, we would also like to give you more control over how your materials compose. We're working on a new material layering system.
Whoo.
Material layering gives you the power to composite PBR textures with custom masks. You can layer rich, realistic surface details to unlock new authoring workflows in Studio. We also envision enabling live material changes directly at runtime to unlock new gameplay possibilities as well. Before we hand it back to Nick, we want to leave you with a first look of this new material layering system running in the engine. Thank you and have a great RDC.
Hello, everyone. That was pretty awesome. Now that we've shared our work, I hope you are as excited as we are about what's ahead. I even managed to get one of these jackets that Oren promised. What you just saw was just some of the improvements we're making across the platform to help you succeed and grow your business. But now let's talk about the most important part of the platform, you, and how you engage with each other. Nobody builds a game on Roblox alone. Somebody answered your question on the dev forum at midnight back when you were the one asking the questions. Strangers joined your game at 2:00 in the morning and ended up becoming part of your team. This happens all across this community, and I know many of you here today can attest to it.
One way we try to support that is with Inspire creators-led programming, both in person and virtually. We hosted our first global cafes in Los Angeles, Houston, New York, Seoul, and São Paulo, where 58% of attendees were at their first in-person event ever. For those who couldn't make it in person, those same creators led virtual workshops in 7 languages, from English to Korean to Polish. Nearly 6,000 questions were answered, and when it came time to build, hundreds took on the challenge and submitted their first game. From devs creating their first experience with Inspire to the conversations you'll have in the halls this weekend, this community is what makes Roblox unique. Everything we walked through today, growth, building your business, tools, avatars, and the engine, it all exists to give you all more room to build and to inspire the devs coming up behind you.
RDC is just getting started. We have sessions throughout the day today and tomorrow. We have booths where you can connect to each other and our engineers and product leaders, including a greater support area where we'll give you hands-on help with your projects. All weekend we want to hear from you. We want your feedback. What are we doing well? What could we be doing better? Don't be shy, and I know you won't. As we wrap up our keynotes, I'm honored and excited to be with you all. It's by working together that we succeed as a community and as a platform. As David shared this morning, we believe the world needs more connection and more play. We have the platform, we have the community, and we have the will.
Together, we are connecting the world together through play, bringing smiles to millions of people all over the world through our passion and our creativity. We have come through a year of transformation stronger than ever with a vibrant user base, with genre-defining content, with new technologies that make it easier than ever for you to share what you imagine with the world across countries, cultures, and languages safely. With the greatest creator community the world has ever seen, it's clear there has never been a better time to be on Roblox. Thank you for helping make this platform what it is today. The world needs more connection and more play, and we're going to give it to them one game at a time. Thank you