Gainfully Employed!

This was a great week on the job hunting front. Jo got a job offer from Volkswagen – they want her to work in the Palo Alto lab on hybrids, fuel cells, biodiesel, and other green stuff – which is pretty much exactly what she was looking to do. I accepted a job offer at ROBLOX, a really cool computer game startup. I have been writing videogames since I was eight, but I never thought that I would end up working as a professional game developer. This position at ROBLOX, however, seems like a ridiculously good fit for me. They are building online games that involve worlds made out of virtual Lego blocks (by which I mean “generic toy building blocks”). Players enter game environments where everything is made out of small bricks and every brick is physically simulated – meaning the entire world is destructible.

There’s an alpha version of the ROBLOX game client on the company website, which I’ve been having some fun with today. Currently the game has two modes. You can visit the sandbox environments that other players have made, or you can enter the experimental multiplayer third person shooter game and run around a large level lobbing rockets at other people.

Today I made a ten minute visit to “arkitect’s Place” and took some screenshots.

This office building is made out of 2500 individual bricks (!!!)

Being an intrepid explorer, I enter the building and start climbing up the stairs

Eventually, I make it to the top of the building

From where I am standing, I use my rocket launcher to fire a rocket at the roof. This causes pieces to fly everywhere. One hits me and I fall off!

Playing with the rocket launcher is a lot of fun. I just blasted the front of the office building.

The ROBLOX engine does an incredible job with the game physics. I’m running on a cruddy 4-year old laptop and I get a reasonable framerate in this level. Anyone who has any experience with physics engines such as ODE or Tokamak will appreciate how hard it is to simulate a stack of bricks, let alone an entire office building. 2500 rigid bodies is a lot for my machine – in some of my other projects Tokamak and ODE both top out at around 400 for realtime simulation. Even more incredible is how well ROBLOX handles physics in multi-user environments.

My friend behind me lost his arm somewhere. Whoops.

I decide to go exploring in the rubble of the office building. I can’t quite get up the stairs.

I try to blast the debris out of my way, but it doesn’t work out like I had planned.

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I start work on Tuesday. I think it’s going to be awesome.