Roblox开发者大会2021：关于Roblox的未来愿景和前路

在Roblox，我们一直致力于用许多共同体验改变着人们互相连接、创造和表达自己的方式。我们正在极速成长，目前已经拥有4300万DAU，并且覆盖180个国家，这些成就都归功于我们的开发者社区，是他们创造了这些沉浸式的体验，而每年的我们也会邀请他们在RDC（Roblox开发者大会）上相聚。RDC是一个面向程序员、创造者、3D设计师等持续多天的社区活动，在这里大家将会聚在一起，直接与我们的产品、技术人员们沟通交流。

在这个活动摘要中，公司创始人Dave Baszucki、开发者关系VP Matt Curtis、以及我自己（CTO Daniel Sturman），我们很开心能够在这里与整个开发者社区分享我们在过去一年中取得的进步，同时分享一些令人激动的更新。

在2020年，我们为了让虚拟世界更加真实，提升渲染保真度。我们发布了Future is Bright，Dynamic Skies 和PBR textures – 这些都是我们迈向更有沉浸感、高渲染、高模拟技术的重要步骤。这帮助我们的开发者，在定制他们曾经体验过的样子和感受时，能够更加真实。

下一步，我们将更专注于模拟特征的提升，比如空气动力和实时体验内的CSG，这可以实现照片级别真实的视觉效果，你可以通过它来将你的想象变为现实。这些能力提升让你可以打造直升机、飞机、或快速移动的小汽车，同时还能保证它有具体的形态，比如曲线，让我们的物理引擎来帮助你完成其他所有你想要的东西吧。

我们对Roblox角色皮肤的愿景，是让它成为你本人的数字化版本。

你可以成为你想成为的任何样子，不论是动作、穿着还是说话方式。因此我们这块内容的更新包括：分层服饰的测试版本和动态头部的测试版本。这些只是第一步，我们会致力于让用户们可以自由地表达他们的表情和个性特征。多层服饰功能可以让我们在定制角色形象的时候有多种组合的可能性，可以让任何一个身体任意搭配多层的服装配饰。同时，动态头部则可以将面部表情做到更加活灵活现。

这些发布是我们实现愿景的重要更新，即通过持续的创新来提升元宇宙的表现力和丰富程度。

我们除了打造能最大化提升开发者生产力的工具和系统，我们也在创造更多机会去建立一个虚拟经济体。

目前我们有130万开发者和创造者正在赚取Robux，而今年，他们通过自己的作品获得超过5亿美元。去年，我们引入了EBP的支付（也称 premiym payouts），作为一种奖励创作者创造互动体验的方式（区别于通过体验内消费而赚取Robux）。

今天，我们前1万的开发者中有50%通过EBP的支付，赚到了比过往体验内消费带来的更多的收入。我们也在给予开发者更多的方式去赚取Robux，包括改善赞助内容，以及让部分开发者可以制作和售卖自己的皮肤配饰。

未来，开发者们可以在Roblox上，通过Roblox开放云做任何事情。我们的编辑器已经成为了开发者手中最不可思议的工具。但随着我们的社区变得更大和更多元，我们感到我们需要提供更多的能力，供开发者们推动整个工具的生态。所以，我们创造了“开放云项目”，希望第三方可以不通过Studio即可简单直接的接入我们的后台服务。这将能创造一个生态，开发者们能够创造和发现自定义工具链来最大化他们的生产力。

开放这些接口将让我们看到新一类的创造者的涌现—创造新的开发工具来提升工作流程（也打开了通过商店来给其他开发者提供工具的新可能）。

Roblox开放云让开发者们将自己的生意搬上一个新台阶，这意味着他们能够：支持更大的团队，支持特定领域，如艺术家或程序员，整合其他工具让环境更加丰富。不仅如此，这还将让用户拥有一个安全和灵活的平台，让他们可以无缝地使用Roblox资源。这些改进都将让Roblox变成一个非常灵敏而又值得信赖的引擎，让开发者们可以创造更优质、更动态和更好表现的体验。

存储是平台扩展能力的重要部分。随着数据变得越来越复杂，为了给开发者们提供更高的灵活性，我们的数据存储现能支持比去年RDC同期16倍的量，我们全新的高吞吐、低延迟的记忆存储数据服务，让开发者能够更快速的访问一个体验中所有服务器的非永久性数据，这将会让开发者们在存储和更新排行榜，或者让用户基于水平等级匹配更加方便。而这些只是开始，未来我们还将会提供更多！

我们一直在思考可以带来更深沉浸感的各种方式，而通过上线测试空间语音，我们已为Roblox发现了一个全新的互动方式。声音和手势是人类自我表达的极其重要的部分。当我们离别人比较远时，我们会提高声量，而需要谨慎时又会小声低语，当我们独自一人或和他人一起时我们也总会有不同的沟通交流风格。在未来，我们将能够赋予我们的文字更多细微差别并配以表情—不仅通过表情符号，也可以通过网络摄像机捕捉我们的面部表情来实现。这将能支持更有意义的体验拓展以及元宇宙中的交互。

最后，我们的愿景是要创造一个包容、每个人都受到欢迎的社区，而安全和文明是这个愿景的基础。我们也在不断提升我们的审核支持。我们今年减少了75%的机器人，也在开发能让开发者们更好管理他们自己社群的工具。我们的未来体验指南和最近发布的年龄验证服务，都在为不同的体验提供安全和文明环境的保障，这也让开发者们可以在确保与Roblox保持一致性的情况下，更加自由地去创造伟大而又独特的体验。随着我们不断地进行的安全与文明相关实践，用户和创作者们将会花费更少的时间来等待审核或者处理不友好的活动参与者，而可以花更多时间专注于将他们的想象变为现实。

展望未来，我们可以预见，元宇宙将继续通过更多的共同体验改变你互动、创造、表达自己的方式。你可以与同学漫步在罗马街道来学习古代罗马历史，与千里之外的好友们一起办一场线上音乐会，与身处世界各地的同事一起举办一个虚拟团建活动。无论你在现实生活中干什么，你都可以在Roblox上同样体验到。在这里，我们将为你留下最前排的座位。

October 14, 2021

by Daniel Sturman, Chief Technology Officer

At Roblox, we are transforming how people come together to connect, create, and express themselves through shared experiences. Our platform has seen tremendous growth with over 43 million daily active users across 180 countries. This is possible thanks to the immersive experiences built by our developer community, who we bring together annually at the Roblox Developers Conference (RDC). RDC is a multi-day event where programmers, builders, and 3D artists alike gather together to hear directly from product and engineering leaders and connect with each other.

In our keynotes, founder and CEO Dave Baszucki, VP of Developer Relations Matt Curtis, and myself had the distinct pleasure of revisiting many of the advancements we’ve made throughout the year and highlighting several exciting platform updates all while immersing ourselves in the Roblox developer community.

In 2020, we made material enhancements in bringing the virtual world to life with rendering fidelity improvements. We released Future is Bright, Dynamic Skies, and PBR Textures—critical steps forward in our vision to create immersive rendering and simulation technology. This allows developers to use greater fidelity as they customize the look and feel of their experiences. Next, we turn our focus to advancements in simulation features like aerodynamics and real-time in-experience CSG, enabling photorealistic visuals that can be modified to bring your vision to reality. These improvements will enable you to build helicopters, airplanes, or fast-moving cars using real shapes, including curves, and having our physics engine do the rest.

Our vision for Roblox Avatars is a digital you, and it can be whoever you want to be, from the way you move, talk, and dress. The latest updates include the upcoming Layered Clothing Studio beta launch and Dynamic Heads beta, which is the first step in enabling users to express the breadth and depth of their emotions and identities. Layered Clothing allows a combinatorial explosion of possibilities in customizing your avatar, as any body can be outfitted with arbitrary layered clothing items. Meanwhile, Dynamic Heads will bring facial expressions and emotes to life. These releases represent important stepping stones in a long line of innovations to improve the expressiveness and combinatorics in the metaverse.

In addition to creating tools and systems that maximize developer productivity, we are creating more opportunities to build a virtual economy. We have 1.3 million developers and creators earning Robux, and this year, they are on track to earn $500 million from their creations. Last year, we introduced engagement-based payouts (called Premium Payouts) as a way to reward developers for creating engaging experiences (in addition to earning Robux through in-experience purchases). Today, 50% of our top 10,000 developers make more from these engagement-based payouts than in-experience purchases. We are also giving developers more ways to earn on the Roblox platform through improvements in sponsored content and the ability for some developers to create and sell their own avatar items.

The future for developers on Roblox is the freedom to do everything on the Roblox Open Cloud. Studio has been an incredible tool for our developers. But as our community gets broader and more diverse, we felt that we needed them to have more ability to drive the ecosystem of tools at their disposal. So, we created our Open Cloud program with the idea that third-party components could simply plug in directly to all our backend services without having to go through Studio. This will create an ecosystem where developers can build and discover custom toolchains that maximize their productivity.

Opening up these interfaces will allow a new class of creators to emerge—building new development tools to enable workflows (and potentially offering them to other developers via a marketplace). The Roblox Open Cloud enables developers to take their businesses to a new level, which means support for large teams; support for specific domains, such as artists or coders; and integrations with other tools that add richness to the environment. Not only that, but it also provides users with a secure and flexible platform, allowing them to access their Roblox resources seamlessly. These improvements will allow Roblox to become an incredibly fast and reliable engine, enabling developers to build better, more dynamic, and higher performing experiences.

Storage is an essential part of the scalability of the platform. To give developers even more flexibility as data gets increasingly complex, our Data Store now supports 16x larger values since last RDC, and our new high throughput, low latency Memory Store data service gives developers the ability to quickly access non-persistent data shared across all servers in an experience. The latter is a great way for developers to store and update rankings on a global leaderboard or optimally matchmake users in their experiences based on skill level. This is just the beginning, and we have so much more coming!

As we consider ways to enable deeper immersion, we’ve added a whole new dimension to interaction on Roblox through our Spatial Voice beta launch. Voice and gestures are critical to human expression. We raise our voice to reach someone far away, we whisper when we want to be discreet, and we alter our communication style depending on if we are alone or with others. In the future, we will be able to add nuance and emotion to our words—not only through emotes, but also through facial expressions captured on our webcams. This supports the scalability of meaningful experiences and interactions in the metaverse.

Finally, safety and civility are foundational to our vision of creating an inclusive community where everyone feels welcome. We are improving our moderation support. We’ve reduced bot exposure by over 75% this year and are building tools to allow developers to manage their own communities. Forthcoming Experience Guidelines and the recently launched Age Verification service help enable dynamic levels of safe and civil interactions across a wide range of experiences. This gives developers the freedom to build great and unique experiences while ensuring consistency across the Roblox platform. As we continuously improve safety and civility practices, users and creators will spend less time waiting for moderation and dealing with bad actors and more time turning their imaginations into reality.

Looking towards the future, we envision that the metaverse will continue to transform how you connect, create, and express yourself through shared experiences. You can learn about ancient Rome by walking through its streets with your classmates, rock out at concerts with friends who live thousands of miles away, and host a virtual team-building activity with your colleagues across the globe. Just about anything you can do in real life you can experience on Roblox. We’ll save you a front-row seat.

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