Book-Larsson shows a human avatar wearing some "hip hop pants and puffer jacket.” As he goes to dress a dinosaur, the pants stretch to accommodate the reptile’s frame. Now people can design clothing for all avatars on the platform, not just a specific body type, without having to rebuild the character. One T-shirt must fit on millions of different bodies, from a dinosaur to a zombie, and have to accommodate for the programming within that game, too: You might get shot and your body fall into pieces, for instance. Yet Roblox doesn't know what kind of crazy character one of the 9 million indie developers on the Roblox platform might come up with. In most games, the designers tailor outfits to fit a specific range of body types: a suit of samurai armor, say, for a tall or short avatar. In 2020, Roblox developed technology that led to smoother and more realistically shaped characters, yet the problem of not knowing the body type your design would end up on remained the same. This was a crucial problem to solve, because Roblox emphasizes combination: You can rip an arm off and put a different arm on, like a doll. Basically, you'd have to rebuild the character. "The problem is that when you started making more complicated characters, which the system actually allowed, there was no way to change the clothes of these more complicated characters," says Book-Larsson. All you had to do, explains Bjorn Book-Larsson, vice president of avatars at Roblox, was open Microsoft Paint and whip up a pink top or jean jacket, and it would fit the avatar as if you had painted it on to their skin. For these 14 years, these avatars' clothes were 2D textures. Its most popular traditional avatar looked essentially the same from 2006 to 2019 (it went from 6 movable parts to 15): squat and blocky, a mix of Lego and Minecraft. If you’re unfamiliar, Roblox is not a game but a space where you make games: You don’t play Roblox exactly, but play games inside of Roblox.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |