Even when fashion and video games seem, in the popular imagination at least, to be bipolar pursuits, players always love to dress up. Now, in-game fashion isn’t just about fancy cosplay festivals or finding a neat mask for Link: it’s tapped into older industries, and there’s no better demonstration of reality. This reality is Roblox, for example, a Gucci bag sells for $4,115 or 350,000 Robux, $800 more than the real thing.
In fact, Roblox, now played by almost 50 million daily and most valuable video game company in the United States, is a platform where character customization and the self-expression it provides are fundamental to the experience. Now, Roblox has created a new system that improves this customizability: “layered clothing”. It has the potential to advance the company’s goal of being more than just a game: a place — whisper it, a reverse-for games.
Customization is key
If you’re not familiar, Roblox is not a game but a space where you make games: You don’t play Accurate Roblox, but Gameplay inside of Roblox. Its most popular traditional avatar looked essentially the same from 2006 to 2019 (it went from 6 moveable parts to 15): squats and cubes, a Lego mix and Minecraft. For 14 years, the clothes of these avatars were 2D textures. All you have to do is open Microsoft Paint and put on a pink jacket or jean jacket, and it’ll look good, explains Bjorn Book-Larsson, vice president of avatars at Roblox. avatar as if you had painted on their skin.
“The problem is, once you start creating more complex characters, as the system allows, there’s no way to change the costumes of these more complex characters,” Book-Larsson says. Larsson said. Basically, you have to rebuild the character. This is an important problem to deal with, because Roblox emphasizes union: You can tear off one arm and put another in, like a doll. In 2020, Roblox has developed technology that results in smoother and more realistically rendered characters, but the matter of not knowing the body type your design will remain the same.
This is where layered clothing comes in. In most games, designers tailor the costumes to suit specific body types: a set of samurai armor, for example, for tall or short avatars. However, Roblox doesn’t know one of those crazy character types 9 million independent developers on the Roblox platform can think. A t-shirt has to fit a million different bodies, from dinosaurs to zombies, and it also has to fit the program in that game: You might get shot and your body fall into multiples, for example. Piece. People can now design clothes for all avatars on the platform, not just a specific body type, without the need to rebuild the character. Book-Larsson shows a human avatar wearing some “hip hop pants and outerwear”. When he dresses up a dinosaur, the pants stretch to fit the reptile’s frame. “And if I put on a t-shirt and then put on a jacket, the two will layer and affect each other,” he says. “Technically, there’s nothing stopping you from putting your coat on a tree, or wearing your pants in a car.”
The technology needed to do this trick is complex: It’s literally rooted in rocket science, inspired by the way air changes shape of a rocket as it rises. “One of our engineers is looking at the topology of how rockets are affected when they’re launched into space and how both the rocket’s shell deforms and how you control the rocket,” he said. that fire. “And then he started using some of the literature around that to figure out how you effectively control multiple layers that are interconnected.”
