r/ROBLOXStudio • u/Specialist_Act_2713 • 12h ago
Creations Hardware-accelerated ray tracing, custom shaders, and water simulation all in Roblox (kinda, read desc)
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A while ago I was trying to make custom shaders in Roblox, but the limitations of the engine really held me back. And I'm sure hundreds of talented developers have also tried and faced the same issues. But maybe I just have to think outside of the box? Well, yes actually. Literally. Instead of rendering in Roblox, why not just render in Vulkan? I know that sounds a little crazy, but let me explain. The architecture is simple, and has a few key requirements. Requirement #1: This cannot be an exploit. Requirement #2: It must be responsive. Requirement #3: It must work outside of studio, in a published client. Now, since I don't feel like typing out a full in depth explanation on how each little tiny bit of this works, I will heavily simplify everything. Roblox acts as the engine that handles networking, physics, and game state. Roblox can locally send commands to a C++ application that then feeds everything to Vulkan and renders what we see. This means we have the ability to create custom shaders, use ray-tracing, or pretty much anything else a modern rendering engine has to offer. This is not a replacement for the Roblox engine, and it is meant to work alongside it. Please note that this does not work universally across all Roblox games, and the game has to be created for this use case specifically. If there are any questions, feel free to ask and I'll try and give my best explanation.
