5 ms·

LunarEngine: An open source, Roblox-compatible game engine

281 points by njredar676 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
extraduder_ire 1y ago
Cool. There's an incredible amount of content created for roblox that's stuck on it currently.
- wernerb 1y ago
  Need to set free all that 'Club' content for sure.
glitchc 1y ago
Yeah but can I spend Robux on it? If not, pass. The whole problem is Robux isn't it? It's not like the engine is anything special.
- andybak 1y ago
  Maybe the idea is that developers can release standalone versions of their Roblox games and escape the platform lock-in? Of course - whether their audience will come with them is a different question.
- Wowfunhappy 1y ago
  I haven't used them (and I despise Roblox) but my understanding is that the Roblox creation tools are actually pretty good.
  - jay_kyburz 1y ago
    I have some kids into editing Roblox, and I'm a full time Unity / Unreal dev, and I would say that the Roblox editor and engine _are_ really good. Kids don't care about fancy graphics, they care about connecting and running around with their friends, in a wide variety of games, that are downloaded and up and running within seconds.
- a2128 1y ago
  There's a number of developers who get stuck on ROBLOX because they learned their creation tools when they were younger (they're easy to use and easily accessible to any desktop ROBLOX player), spent their formative years mastering their skills, and those skills turn out to be niche and not easily transferable to most other game engines. The choice is between basically restarting as a beginner in Unity, or continue making advanced creations on ROBLOX with all their friends and prestige they've earned in various sub-communities. To be honest I'm surprised it took this long for someone to try making an API-compatible alternative
- burgerrito 1y ago
  Maybe this can be used as a way to archive a Roblox game? I'm not really a Roblox player so I'm not sure.
poly2it 1y ago
Best wishes, this is really neat. I hope it won't get slaughtered by Roblox's legal team. A potential use-case might be to create a Linux-native client. The one used by most right now (Sober) is proprietary, after the previous (Vinegar) got shut down because of Linux haxxors.
- Wowfunhappy 1y ago
  > I hope it won't get slaughtered by Roblox's legal team. I'm not saying Roblox won't try, but this project strikes me as very obviously legal. If legality was a spectrum, I'd rank this higher than VLC Media Player (patents) and way above an NES emulator. I suppose it'd be below Android, and Oracle did sue over Android. (Disclaimer, I am not a lawyer, etc.)
  - 999900000999 1y ago
    Two factors are at play. This looks like it just reimplements a few Roblox APIs in an open source engine. It would of probably made more sense to just create a Roblox to Godot translator or something. Second, your poking a multi billion dollar bear. If this project ever takes off Roblox will take action, right or wrong that's enough to stop most small projects. You can be right, but you don't have millions to fight non stop lawsuits. In reality this is a cute proof of concept. It's never going to compete with the actual product. If it does Roblox will have it stopped in 72 hours
    - gjsman-1000 1y ago
      In practice, no society has ever overcome “might makes right.” Or, arguably, ever will. The good news though; it’s lawyers shutting down your project. Yesterday, it was hiring someone to break your knees.
      - DANmode 1y ago
        The Pirate Bay, SciHub. The Internet interprets censorship (legal, moral, or otherwise) as damage, and routes around it.
ktallett 1y ago
This is fantastic! It is a very useful tool for preservation of games on Roblox. I hope this can be used for good to save the many creative and original works on the platform in a way that we didn't with flash games.
- Dilettante_ 1y ago
  >in a way that we didn't with flash games I thought Flashpoint[1] did pretty well about that? The full download is 1.68TB, I'd wager most stuff you'd have seen back then would be on there. [1]https://flashpointarchive.org/ https://flashpointarchive.org/
- unleaded 1y ago
  Roblox preservation has pretty much been a solved problem since around 2016. The clients all have built-in network servers and many people have built launchers to let you easily play a server with your friends. A lot of the knowledge is unfortunately gatekeeped inside Discord communities of crazy people but there are a few "good names" out there (Novetus is the big one)
  - jhatemyjob 1y ago
    Thanks for that info. To be honest this librebox project looks kinda fishy to me. Seems like the author never used version control before. They put everything into one commit [1] and are making changes to the repo using the Github web UI. I wish the dev the best of luck but I wouldn't be surprised if this project gets abandoned in a few months [1] https://github.com/librebox-devs/librebox-demo/commit/e70ea34cf93dbcda1cf398adf23f75f4e897c0d7 https://github.com/librebox-devs/librebox-demo/commit/e70ea3...
    - njredar676 1y ago
      Haha, thanks for telling me about that. Reflecting now, I feel that was a little goofy. I was working on the project by myself in VS Code and, along with the demo, committed the entire source code on release. Future development will, of course, be used with version control. I'm also sharpening my version control skills. I had simply done some quick changes with the web UI for language (and also to add more demo images later). Not sure how this is correlated to the actual product though.
doctorpangloss 1y ago
There are a lot of free remakes of commercial games, and a lot of free remakes of commercial game platform engines. How do the developers of Librebox decide to work on this instead of: - remaking one specific, good game on Roblox, such as remaking Bloxburg, in something more practical like Unity? - working on an existing free remake of a Roblox game, like Nexus Battles, which of course, was archived? - working on something else? I’m asking the “Libreboxdevs.” It’s nice to hear these POVs directly from the developers. As you guys read this on a Saturday morning, consider that I’m not asking for, what features are going to be added to your GitHub project, or a comparison between Librebox and other game engines or whatever. I’m asking about your personal decision making.
533474 1y ago
You should rename the project to OpenBox if you are not using a copyleft license. It is not libre.
- LtdJorge 1y ago
  Libre means free. MIT gives more freedom than copyleft.
  - tombert 1y ago
    I think they're saying that "Libre" typically implies Copyleft, with a GPL or AGPL or MPL License. Something that (in some cases) forces you to make your changes available. LibreOffice, for example, is Mozilla Public Licensed, which is a weak copyleft, like LGPL (I think).
    - microtonal 1y ago
      It's just silly gatekeeping. E.g. LibreSSL is permissively-licensed and is from 2014.
      - tombert 1y ago
        Yeah fair enough. Pedantry about names can get silly.
  - ekzy 1y ago
    French native here. Libre means free in the sense of freedom, not in the sense of free as in free beer (the term for that is “gratuit”)
    - LtdJorge 1y ago
      Yeah, that’s what I was saying. Spanish native myself :D
  - F3nd0 1y ago
    Whether MIT-type licences give more freedom than copyleft is very disputable, since they make it extremely easy to lose. But you are right that terms like ‘free’ or ‘libre’ are in no way restricted to copyleft.
koshergweilo 1y ago
> Librebox is currently in demo stage (it implements a limited subset of the Roblox API Probably worth mentioning this is just a demo. There's a looooong list of API features that aren't implemented (most notably servers and networking)
- jay_kyburz 1y ago
  I would start with the servers and networking if I were them. It can be really hard to bolt that on later.
  - njredar676 1y ago
    Good point. We thought about this in advance. The reason we chose to prioritize client support, then server, was replication. If we develop a strong client with broad support, it makes developing the replication piece easier, since the client already supports the features in mind. It would also allow us to make Librebox more practical for game development in its early stages. We'd love to see how you could do the client-server model though. Perhaps, there is a new and more efficient way.
    - gus_tpm 1y ago
      Makes total sense. It's even better for motivation of the developer. The offline client proves that it is possible to continue working on this huge project since it gives you "quick" feedback that you are making progress. Good luck guys!
    - jay_kyburz 1y ago
      >If we develop a strong client with broad support, it makes developing the replication piece easier, since the client already supports the features in mind Unless you are running the client against server, you will never know if the client features you are writing are any good. The games need to run on the server by default, and the clients are just a "view" into what is happening on the server. For ease of development, your app is a fully functioning server and a client in a single application. When playing single player, the game is still running on a local server, with only a single client connected. I strongly recommend building everything around the communication pipeline between the server and client. Make it very easy to dial up latency and packet loss.
westurner 1y ago
Does this increase local testability and thus QA-ability for roblox devs? I was just looking at trying to get Lemur (archived) running in Lune in order to run jest tests running in a react-lua app the other day. I have a start at a test runner with optional in-game output, but getting jest tests to run at init in studio in order to not require run-in-roblox which doesn't yet work on Linux with vinegar flatpaks studio or vinegar in a devcontainer. It would save so much trouble if RobloxStudio.exe could take `--place game.rbxlx --script test_runner.lua --keep-open` args and regularly flush console output to a file. westurner:lemur:patch_for_roblox_support: https://github.com/LPGhatguy/lemur/compare/master...westurner:lemur:patch_for_roblox_support https://github.com/LPGhatguy/lemur/compare/master...westurne... .. new require() implementation in lune v0.10: https://github.com/lune-org/lune/issues/311#issuecomment-3208766553 https://github.com/lune-org/lune/issues/311#issuecomment-320... I started to add loadPlaceFile to read an rbxlx to lemur and thought it probably the wrong place given that it's archived. TIL about Librebox, which can hopefully run tests with Jest with this stemgame react-lua app I've MIT licensed, in local CI too years later. There is a hosted CI service for running Luau code in Roblox places. "[Beta] Open Cloud Engine API for Executing Luau" https://devforum.roblox.com/t/beta-open-cloud-engine-api-for-executing-luau/3172185 https://devforum.roblox.com/t/beta-open-cloud-engine-api-for... Advantages to running tests locally: record screenshots and screencasts and save on test failure, immediate feedback, -i/--interactive drop into game session on test failure
bstsb 1y ago
can't find anything about the developers from the github repo. their discord server is even stranger; there's absolutely nothing in the channels, and the only member with a developer role is an account dedicated to the "project". looking at the source, work has absolutely been done - this isn't just a README - but it's still all a bit strange
- JoeOfTexas 1y ago
  One man shows be like that =(
- mattigames 1y ago
  My most charitable interpretation is that they are hiding their identities because they are afraid of any legal trouble, after all Roblox is an 81 billion organization.
- njredar676 1y ago
  Hey, thanks for informing us about this. I apologize if the first impression was crude -- I was in an hurry to get the engine out at this time. I understand that the Discord server simply consisted of a few channels (since then, I've cleaned that up). I had actually wanted to make a new GitHub account for the project, to separate concerns (GitHub ToS prohibits this, and I had to learn the hard way), so I eventually renamed my old account. I'll make sure to provide more resources under my account so it doesn't seem empty. In regards to developer attribution, we will have a developer page as well as a resource hub so it seems more than an "account". I had not anticipated that people would look deeper into the account -- I had simply wanted to get the demo out, to show the concept. On a separate note, I acknowledge some people found it suspicious that the initial commit was every file at once. This doesn't mean I don't know how version control works. It was because I had actually worked on the project alone on my computer and, subject to release, released the full source at once. Once again, thanks for informing us about these issues. Perhaps, I will better prepare my future releases to avoid this issues, even if I was under time constraints. I think that there are great things that can be accomplished with this project.
  - 1y ago
daft_pink 1y ago
The Roblox debacle really reminds me of the 90’s where almost every arrested child predator was using AOL, but the news media would use the word “online service” or some really generic term as AOL spent so much money on advertising. A 5 year old isn’t going to be using IRC after all.
- sejje 1y ago
  This is about an open source coding project
  - daft_pink 1y ago
    Is it an accident that they are releasing an open source Roblox, when the for profit company is becoming such a pariah in the news this week? I’ve heard more about Roblox and their poor position on child safety this week than total mentions of roblox for years.
paweladamczuk 1y ago
>missing :WaitForChild() That's good... isn't it?
- DistractionRect 1y ago
  It's not the end of the world, it's a minor convenience and better than busy waiting. There are plenty of cases where you want to manipulate an object but it's not guaranteed that it exists before your code is run. You get similar functionality with: while not parentObj:FindFirstChild("childObj name") do wait() end AFAIK, wait() is >= 1/30 of a second, if you wanted to be extra timely you'd instead run every heartbeat.
  - forkerenok 1y ago
    "Popular kids game Roblox faces pressure over allegations of child predators on its platform": https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/shows/top-stories/blog/rcna225877 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/shows/t... I read your comment carefully to see whether you've taken the GP's joke further, but alas :)
    - DistractionRect 1y ago
      Ha, yeah. Sailed right over my head. It's really too bad. Both about the what the platform has become and the missed setup.
      - gus_tpm 1y ago
        Programming doesn't make it easy to not miss jokes like that. I'll never forget my mum's face after I told her that I was working on a "killAllChildren" function when I was at school
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
OH PARDON ME BUT Y'KNOW WHY I AM GETTING SO EXCITED to talk in caps on HN? Because I was on discord the other day and was talking about roblox and literally everyone hates it but people there were saying eh, we just play with friends we don't care, and I was like we definitely need to figure our shit since roblox doesn't give a (if I might swear since roblox disgusts me, but roblox doesn't give a fuck about child safety) I was thinking of having roblox be sorta as the what'd you say, minecraft but less blocky. So to me, an open world which can be modded till now was maybe creating a whole game (which imo is wrong approach for things like roblox) and to me the thing which made sense back then (2 weeks ago) was Luanti (formerly minetest) with custom mod and hosting the server. I am so excited,so doped for this one man. Heck, I will build products for this and host them for free or maybe create jupyter python notebook scripts which can run the games don't worry. I want open source to succeed so badly in this genre just because of the safety aspect.
- rfl890 1y ago
  What?
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    my bad, I hadn't seen the project and I think that the title might be changed or something or maybe it was my mistake but I felt like it was a completely original contender to games like roblox or maybe inspired by it like luanti (minetest) is to minecraft but still without necessarily having the same api's etc. Seeing it now, It feels like a reimplentation project of sorts. I was clearly excited wishing for a new approach but it seems not. Well, I feel like I should pardon because I had been completely unprofessional and my take was wrong. But yeah, on a satirical side please don't cancel me for making a wrong take lol (jk)
difirant 1y ago
This is some fine repository.
kragen 1y ago
Are the majority of programmers currently Roblox programmers? I think they might be.
- whizzter 1y ago
  No, but there's an ridiculous amount of programmers whose first language will have been Lua and have grown up with using first class functions and composition over inheritance from day one.
  - kragen 1y ago
    Well, you can inherit in Lua, right? In http://lua-users.org/wiki/InheritanceTutorial http://lua-users.org/wiki/InheritanceTutorial it's just setmetatable(new_class, {__index = base_class}) because __index can be a table; it doesn't have to be a function. I've never tried Roblox, so I have no idea how often people do such things in it.
tomjuggler 1y ago
Can we expect a clone here, like Mine Test for Minecraft?
madjam002 1y ago
This is pretty cool and brings back a lot of memories for me. When I was younger I remember building a clone of Roblox in C# with the Lua scripting engine part as well. I even ported some script builder scripts over to it (Player199 admin commands or something like that, can’t remember the name exactly) Good times

281 points by njredar676 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

extraduder_ire 1y ago

Cool. There's an incredible amount of content created for roblox that's stuck on it currently.

wernerb 1y ago
Need to set free all that 'Club' content for sure.

glitchc 1y ago

Yeah but can I spend Robux on it? If not, pass. The whole problem is Robux isn't it? It's not like the engine is anything special.

andybak 1y ago
Maybe the idea is that developers can release standalone versions of their Roblox games and escape the platform lock-in? Of course - whether their audience will come with them is a different question.
Wowfunhappy 1y ago
I haven't used them (and I despise Roblox) but my understanding is that the Roblox creation tools are actually pretty good.
- jay_kyburz 1y ago
  I have some kids into editing Roblox, and I'm a full time Unity / Unreal dev, and I would say that the Roblox editor and engine _are_ really good. Kids don't care about fancy graphics, they care about connecting and running around with their friends, in a wide variety of games, that are downloaded and up and running within seconds.
a2128 1y ago
There's a number of developers who get stuck on ROBLOX because they learned their creation tools when they were younger (they're easy to use and easily accessible to any desktop ROBLOX player), spent their formative years mastering their skills, and those skills turn out to be niche and not easily transferable to most other game engines. The choice is between basically restarting as a beginner in Unity, or continue making advanced creations on ROBLOX with all their friends and prestige they've earned in various sub-communities. To be honest I'm surprised it took this long for someone to try making an API-compatible alternative
burgerrito 1y ago
Maybe this can be used as a way to archive a Roblox game? I'm not really a Roblox player so I'm not sure.

poly2it 1y ago

Best wishes, this is really neat. I hope it won't get slaughtered by Roblox's legal team. A potential use-case might be to create a Linux-native client. The one used by most right now (Sober) is proprietary, after the previous (Vinegar) got shut down because of Linux haxxors.

Wowfunhappy 1y ago
> I hope it won't get slaughtered by Roblox's legal team. I'm not saying Roblox won't try, but this project strikes me as very obviously legal. If legality was a spectrum, I'd rank this higher than VLC Media Player (patents) and way above an NES emulator. I suppose it'd be below Android, and Oracle did sue over Android. (Disclaimer, I am not a lawyer, etc.)
- 999900000999 1y ago
  Two factors are at play. This looks like it just reimplements a few Roblox APIs in an open source engine. It would of probably made more sense to just create a Roblox to Godot translator or something. Second, your poking a multi billion dollar bear. If this project ever takes off Roblox will take action, right or wrong that's enough to stop most small projects. You can be right, but you don't have millions to fight non stop lawsuits. In reality this is a cute proof of concept. It's never going to compete with the actual product. If it does Roblox will have it stopped in 72 hours
  - gjsman-1000 1y ago
    In practice, no society has ever overcome “might makes right.” Or, arguably, ever will. The good news though; it’s lawyers shutting down your project. Yesterday, it was hiring someone to break your knees.
    - DANmode 1y ago
      The Pirate Bay, SciHub. The Internet interprets censorship (legal, moral, or otherwise) as damage, and routes around it.

ktallett 1y ago

This is fantastic! It is a very useful tool for preservation of games on Roblox. I hope this can be used for good to save the many creative and original works on the platform in a way that we didn't with flash games.

Dilettante_ 1y ago
>in a way that we didn't with flash games I thought Flashpoint[1] did pretty well about that? The full download is 1.68TB, I'd wager most stuff you'd have seen back then would be on there. [1]https://flashpointarchive.org/ https://flashpointarchive.org/
unleaded 1y ago
Roblox preservation has pretty much been a solved problem since around 2016. The clients all have built-in network servers and many people have built launchers to let you easily play a server with your friends. A lot of the knowledge is unfortunately gatekeeped inside Discord communities of crazy people but there are a few "good names" out there (Novetus is the big one)
- jhatemyjob 1y ago
  Thanks for that info. To be honest this librebox project looks kinda fishy to me. Seems like the author never used version control before. They put everything into one commit [1] and are making changes to the repo using the Github web UI. I wish the dev the best of luck but I wouldn't be surprised if this project gets abandoned in a few months [1] https://github.com/librebox-devs/librebox-demo/commit/e70ea34cf93dbcda1cf398adf23f75f4e897c0d7 https://github.com/librebox-devs/librebox-demo/commit/e70ea3...
  - njredar676 1y ago
    Haha, thanks for telling me about that. Reflecting now, I feel that was a little goofy. I was working on the project by myself in VS Code and, along with the demo, committed the entire source code on release. Future development will, of course, be used with version control. I'm also sharpening my version control skills. I had simply done some quick changes with the web UI for language (and also to add more demo images later). Not sure how this is correlated to the actual product though.

doctorpangloss 1y ago

There are a lot of free remakes of commercial games, and a lot of free remakes of commercial game platform engines. How do the developers of Librebox decide to work on this instead of: - remaking one specific, good game on Roblox, such as remaking Bloxburg, in something more practical like Unity? - working on an existing free remake of a Roblox game, like Nexus Battles, which of course, was archived? - working on something else? I’m asking the “Libreboxdevs.” It’s nice to hear these POVs directly from the developers. As you guys read this on a Saturday morning, consider that I’m not asking for, what features are going to be added to your GitHub project, or a comparison between Librebox and other game engines or whatever. I’m asking about your personal decision making.

533474 1y ago

You should rename the project to OpenBox if you are not using a copyleft license. It is not libre.

LtdJorge 1y ago
Libre means free. MIT gives more freedom than copyleft.
- tombert 1y ago
  I think they're saying that "Libre" typically implies Copyleft, with a GPL or AGPL or MPL License. Something that (in some cases) forces you to make your changes available. LibreOffice, for example, is Mozilla Public Licensed, which is a weak copyleft, like LGPL (I think).
  - microtonal 1y ago
    It's just silly gatekeeping. E.g. LibreSSL is permissively-licensed and is from 2014.
    - tombert 1y ago
      Yeah fair enough. Pedantry about names can get silly.
- ekzy 1y ago
  French native here. Libre means free in the sense of freedom, not in the sense of free as in free beer (the term for that is “gratuit”)
  - LtdJorge 1y ago
    Yeah, that’s what I was saying. Spanish native myself :D
- F3nd0 1y ago
  Whether MIT-type licences give more freedom than copyleft is very disputable, since they make it extremely easy to lose. But you are right that terms like ‘free’ or ‘libre’ are in no way restricted to copyleft.

koshergweilo 1y ago

> Librebox is currently in demo stage (it implements a limited subset of the Roblox API Probably worth mentioning this is just a demo. There's a looooong list of API features that aren't implemented (most notably servers and networking)

jay_kyburz 1y ago
I would start with the servers and networking if I were them. It can be really hard to bolt that on later.
- njredar676 1y ago
  Good point. We thought about this in advance. The reason we chose to prioritize client support, then server, was replication. If we develop a strong client with broad support, it makes developing the replication piece easier, since the client already supports the features in mind. It would also allow us to make Librebox more practical for game development in its early stages. We'd love to see how you could do the client-server model though. Perhaps, there is a new and more efficient way.
  - gus_tpm 1y ago
    Makes total sense. It's even better for motivation of the developer. The offline client proves that it is possible to continue working on this huge project since it gives you "quick" feedback that you are making progress. Good luck guys!
  - jay_kyburz 1y ago
    >If we develop a strong client with broad support, it makes developing the replication piece easier, since the client already supports the features in mind Unless you are running the client against server, you will never know if the client features you are writing are any good. The games need to run on the server by default, and the clients are just a "view" into what is happening on the server. For ease of development, your app is a fully functioning server and a client in a single application. When playing single player, the game is still running on a local server, with only a single client connected. I strongly recommend building everything around the communication pipeline between the server and client. Make it very easy to dial up latency and packet loss.

westurner 1y ago

Does this increase local testability and thus QA-ability for roblox devs? I was just looking at trying to get Lemur (archived) running in Lune in order to run jest tests running in a react-lua app the other day. I have a start at a test runner with optional in-game output, but getting jest tests to run at init in studio in order to not require run-in-roblox which doesn't yet work on Linux with vinegar flatpaks studio or vinegar in a devcontainer. It would save so much trouble if RobloxStudio.exe could take `--place game.rbxlx --script test_runner.lua --keep-open` args and regularly flush console output to a file. westurner:lemur:patch_for_roblox_support: https://github.com/LPGhatguy/lemur/compare/master...westurner:lemur:patch_for_roblox_support https://github.com/LPGhatguy/lemur/compare/master...westurne... .. new require() implementation in lune v0.10: https://github.com/lune-org/lune/issues/311#issuecomment-3208766553 https://github.com/lune-org/lune/issues/311#issuecomment-320... I started to add loadPlaceFile to read an rbxlx to lemur and thought it probably the wrong place given that it's archived. TIL about Librebox, which can hopefully run tests with Jest with this stemgame react-lua app I've MIT licensed, in local CI too years later. There is a hosted CI service for running Luau code in Roblox places. "[Beta] Open Cloud Engine API for Executing Luau" https://devforum.roblox.com/t/beta-open-cloud-engine-api-for-executing-luau/3172185 https://devforum.roblox.com/t/beta-open-cloud-engine-api-for... Advantages to running tests locally: record screenshots and screencasts and save on test failure, immediate feedback, -i/--interactive drop into game session on test failure

bstsb 1y ago

can't find anything about the developers from the github repo. their discord server is even stranger; there's absolutely nothing in the channels, and the only member with a developer role is an account dedicated to the "project". looking at the source, work has absolutely been done - this isn't just a README - but it's still all a bit strange

JoeOfTexas 1y ago
One man shows be like that =(
mattigames 1y ago
My most charitable interpretation is that they are hiding their identities because they are afraid of any legal trouble, after all Roblox is an 81 billion organization.
njredar676 1y ago
Hey, thanks for informing us about this. I apologize if the first impression was crude -- I was in an hurry to get the engine out at this time. I understand that the Discord server simply consisted of a few channels (since then, I've cleaned that up). I had actually wanted to make a new GitHub account for the project, to separate concerns (GitHub ToS prohibits this, and I had to learn the hard way), so I eventually renamed my old account. I'll make sure to provide more resources under my account so it doesn't seem empty. In regards to developer attribution, we will have a developer page as well as a resource hub so it seems more than an "account". I had not anticipated that people would look deeper into the account -- I had simply wanted to get the demo out, to show the concept. On a separate note, I acknowledge some people found it suspicious that the initial commit was every file at once. This doesn't mean I don't know how version control works. It was because I had actually worked on the project alone on my computer and, subject to release, released the full source at once. Once again, thanks for informing us about these issues. Perhaps, I will better prepare my future releases to avoid this issues, even if I was under time constraints. I think that there are great things that can be accomplished with this project.
- 1y ago

daft_pink 1y ago

The Roblox debacle really reminds me of the 90’s where almost every arrested child predator was using AOL, but the news media would use the word “online service” or some really generic term as AOL spent so much money on advertising. A 5 year old isn’t going to be using IRC after all.

sejje 1y ago
This is about an open source coding project
- daft_pink 1y ago
  Is it an accident that they are releasing an open source Roblox, when the for profit company is becoming such a pariah in the news this week? I’ve heard more about Roblox and their poor position on child safety this week than total mentions of roblox for years.

paweladamczuk 1y ago

>missing :WaitForChild() That's good... isn't it?

DistractionRect 1y ago
It's not the end of the world, it's a minor convenience and better than busy waiting. There are plenty of cases where you want to manipulate an object but it's not guaranteed that it exists before your code is run. You get similar functionality with: while not parentObj:FindFirstChild("childObj name") do wait() end AFAIK, wait() is >= 1/30 of a second, if you wanted to be extra timely you'd instead run every heartbeat.
- forkerenok 1y ago
  "Popular kids game Roblox faces pressure over allegations of child predators on its platform": https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/shows/top-stories/blog/rcna225877 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/shows/t... I read your comment carefully to see whether you've taken the GP's joke further, but alas :)
  - DistractionRect 1y ago
    Ha, yeah. Sailed right over my head. It's really too bad. Both about the what the platform has become and the missed setup.
    - gus_tpm 1y ago
      Programming doesn't make it easy to not miss jokes like that. I'll never forget my mum's face after I told her that I was working on a "killAllChildren" function when I was at school

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago

OH PARDON ME BUT Y'KNOW WHY I AM GETTING SO EXCITED to talk in caps on HN? Because I was on discord the other day and was talking about roblox and literally everyone hates it but people there were saying eh, we just play with friends we don't care, and I was like we definitely need to figure our shit since roblox doesn't give a (if I might swear since roblox disgusts me, but roblox doesn't give a fuck about child safety) I was thinking of having roblox be sorta as the what'd you say, minecraft but less blocky. So to me, an open world which can be modded till now was maybe creating a whole game (which imo is wrong approach for things like roblox) and to me the thing which made sense back then (2 weeks ago) was Luanti (formerly minetest) with custom mod and hosting the server. I am so excited,so doped for this one man. Heck, I will build products for this and host them for free or maybe create jupyter python notebook scripts which can run the games don't worry. I want open source to succeed so badly in this genre just because of the safety aspect.

rfl890 1y ago
What?
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  my bad, I hadn't seen the project and I think that the title might be changed or something or maybe it was my mistake but I felt like it was a completely original contender to games like roblox or maybe inspired by it like luanti (minetest) is to minecraft but still without necessarily having the same api's etc. Seeing it now, It feels like a reimplentation project of sorts. I was clearly excited wishing for a new approach but it seems not. Well, I feel like I should pardon because I had been completely unprofessional and my take was wrong. But yeah, on a satirical side please don't cancel me for making a wrong take lol (jk)

difirant 1y ago

This is some fine repository.

kragen 1y ago

Are the majority of programmers currently Roblox programmers? I think they might be.

whizzter 1y ago
No, but there's an ridiculous amount of programmers whose first language will have been Lua and have grown up with using first class functions and composition over inheritance from day one.
- kragen 1y ago
  Well, you can inherit in Lua, right? In http://lua-users.org/wiki/InheritanceTutorial http://lua-users.org/wiki/InheritanceTutorial it's just setmetatable(new_class, {__index = base_class}) because __index can be a table; it doesn't have to be a function. I've never tried Roblox, so I have no idea how often people do such things in it.

tomjuggler 1y ago

Can we expect a clone here, like Mine Test for Minecraft?

madjam002 1y ago

This is pretty cool and brings back a lot of memories for me. When I was younger I remember building a clone of Roblox in C# with the Lua scripting engine part as well. I even ported some script builder scripts over to it (Player199 admin commands or something like that, can’t remember the name exactly) Good times