In December 2022, we hosted our annual Hack Week. During this week, Robloxians put our values into action by pursuing projects that drive rapid innovation. This was our largest annual self-organized event to date, with over 400 employees across 225 teams competing for a spot in the top three in each of four categories.

Unleashing Curiosity and Driving Innovation for Our Platform

Hack Week takes place during our annual code freeze, which gives everyone across Roblox time to pursue a diverse set of projects. We take whatever has piqued our curiosity throughout the year and act on it. Several past projects have gone on to become fully-implemented products or features on the platform. 

So, what’s the secret to lining up an awesome Hack Week project? It’s all about taking big risks and asking big questions. “We’re talking about reimagining the way people come together,” shares Dave Baszucki, Founder & CEO. “We’re talking about the evolution of communication technology, all the way from phone to video to immersive 3D. I think one of the biggest things that this week does is validate our vision. It’s not 20 years away. It’s something that we’re making progress on every year. Hack Week is the ultimate definition of innovation at scale.”

This year, projects reached all parts of the platform and technical stack. Here are some of this year’s projects to show the breadth of what teams worked on:

• Supporting live performances in Roblox with the creation of an open-source plugin that allows streaming of audio and motion capture data to drive avatars in the experience. 
• An image filter component that will allow our developers to manipulate their images so their experiences have a distinctive style. 
• A framework to perform common debugging and testing actions that will be accessible on all client platforms.
• A dashboard to analyze the official Creator Documentation and provide information about how to improve its coverage and quality.

Adding a New Level of Competition

“Hack Week is definitely not a week off. It is a week on for the people who are participating,” says Claus Moberg, VP of Engineering and Hack Week organizer. “We work hard at Roblox, but this may be the hardest that somebody works all year. You have a very short time period to get your project done. And it’s competitive.” 

In past years, senior leaders evaluated and hand-selected projects that were particularly innovative to share out with the entire company. This year, we developed a judging and scoring process to identify the best of the best. During registration, teams selected one of the four company values for their projects, which also determined the judging categories. To submit, teams created a three-minute-long video that showcased their work. A panel of over a dozen judges – senior leaders from across Roblox – evaluated each submission, narrowing down the projects to finalists. At the year’s last Town Hall, the finalists presented, answered questions, and then awaited final placements. 

As one of the judges, Claus looked for a couple of attributes in each project. “I’m really excited to see everything from massive long-term innovation to near-term tactical solutions. Overall, I’m looking for projects that speak to our core company values and have impact on our users, employees, and on Roblox as a whole.”

The Winners

Hack Week closed with an awards celebration where the finalists learned about their placements in their respective categories and claimed their Hack Week trophies. Stef Corazza, Head of Studio Engineering – Creator, was a member of the team that took home the 2nd place trophy in the Take the Long View category. His team’s project centered around bringing live performances to Roblox. While winning was great, his favorite part about Hack Week was, “… really about the team and how we came together. All six of us had different skill sets with very different backgrounds.” 

Two highlights stuck out for first place winners of the We are Responsible category Kevin Koleckar and Nicholas Choi. “Getting to collaborate with someone that I’m not usually collaborating with was my favorite part,” says Kevin. “Nick and I have been on the same team in the past, but over the last year, we’ve worked on different things. Hack Week gave us the chance to come back and work on something together.”

For Nick, Hack Week created space to pursue something he’s been interested in. “Our project has been something I’ve been thinking about doing for a really long time, so it was just really exciting to see it come to fruition.”

According to Claus, it’s not all about winning. “There are so many projects that are incredible and that really are the future of the platform. All of the work that people have put in is being recognized by leaders at the company and is going to be shared with the teams that are responsible for those areas. Every single project has the potential to inform how our product is built moving forward.”

Claus continues, “Hack Week at Roblox is really core to our culture of innovation. Every year, we see projects that blow our minds. The way our teams attack these big questions and find solutions to things nobody has built before… Hack Week is one of the greatest examples of Roblox’s approach to innovation.”

Check out a highlight reel of the winning teams and their projects:

Ask a Final Fantasy 14 diehard what mods they use and many of them will say GShade, a fork of Reshade that lets you customize the game’s visuals. GShade has long been the tool to make the MMO (and several other games) look pretty (opens in new tab) for screenshots, allowing you to add shaders for a more vibrant or avant-garde aesthetic.

GShade, at least for the moment, is gone. Its creator, Marot Satil, announced in the GPOSERS Discord that it “will not receive updates for the time being.” But at the time of this writing, GShade’s GitHub (opens in new tab) page, including Satil’s account, have been removed (opens in new tab).

When Blizzard set Diablo 4’s release date to June 6, it also announced that it would get an open beta. Right now, you can’t sign up for it anywhere, but if you preorder the game, you’re promised early access. According to the game’s producer, it might be coming very soon.

Last week, Diablo 4 producer Rod Fergusson wrote on Twitter (opens in new tab) that the start date for the open beta will be announced soon. “If only we were presenting at some sort of gaming moment this month where one might announce such a thing…” he said, which could potentially be in reference to IGN’s Fan Fest 2023 (opens in new tab) stream later this month.

Just a few weeks ago, Redditor Hour_Thanks6235 wrote in that thread: “I have a RTX 4090, and I am getting so annoyed by this I think this might be me slowly going back to console gaming.”

Unreal Engine 4 is a common culprit in the new wave of stuttery PC games, with the Final Fantasy 7 Remake being a particularly high profile example. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and we have proof. Tango Gameworks’ rhythm-action game Hi-Fi Rush came out of nowhere on January 25, with a surprise release the same day it was announced. And an even bigger surprise awaited within: this Unreal Engine 4 game is smoother than a Chuck Mangione flugelhorn solo.

How did they do it? I had no idea, so I asked.

“First, we were careful in choosing performant tech that fits our gameplay and game aesthetics, so that we can have a great CPU/GPU performance base to work from,” lead graphics programmer Kosuke Tanaka wrote over email. “We also track CPU/GPU performance daily at the in-game checkpoints to make sure we aren’t introducing  performance problems. We use standard UE4 functionality to adjust latency timings and analysis with  profiling tools and careful in-game playtesting to make sure we are providing users with the best gameplay feel.”

Game director John Johanas added that so far since release, Tango Gameworks has gotten “an incredible amount of positive feedback on our work on optimization and how smoothly it runs on even very old hardware,” and I can attest that Hi-Fi Rush runs beautifully on the Steam Deck. But Tanaka’s explanation might make you wonder if other UE4 games just push hardware too hard, or if their developers aren’t noticing the kinds of spikes the Hi-Fi Rush team carefully watched for.

Likely no—many of today’s issues stem directly from the DirectX12 and Vulkan graphics APIs. “The problem is caused by DX12, Vulkan PSO (Pipeline State Object) compilation,” Tanaka wrote. “When a game loads a shader for the first time, GPU drivers begin compilation causing hitches. Devs spend a lot of time replaying the same scene, so tend to miss PSO compile related hitching.”

Here’s a very quick explanation of what a shader actually is, but the main thing you need to know for this problem to make sense is that your graphics card will compile and store shaders once a game uses them for the first time. This is why using a new ability or entering a new area is most likely to cause stuttering: the game’s basically caught off guard and takes a few hundred milliseconds to pull the new shader out of its pocket. There are other reasons games can stutter, but this is one of the most common culprits right now, and is why stuttering will be at its worst early in a game and lessen over time as you build up a shader compilation, like Tanaka mentioned.

Why is Unreal Engine 4 so notorious, then? The engine has a feature in place to cache shaders and prevent those stutter-causing in-the-moment shader calls, but it doesn’t cover everything. 

“Hi-Fi Rush uses Unreal Engine 4’s PSO Caching functionality to avoid large hitches,” Tanaka wrote. “UE4 misses some cases such as certain lighting shader combinations, computer shaders, Niagara VFX, and these may still cause hitches. In Hi-Fi Rush, some hitches remain, but they are mostly during certain cutscene transitions that don’t affect gameplay. In another one of our UE4 titles, Ghostwire: Tokyo, we currently preload problematic assets in the title screen background to minimize hitching and try to provide a better gamer experience.”

Hi-Fi Rush uses DirectX12 (but unlike with FF7 Remake, you don’t have to switch to DirectX 11 to avoid stuttering). If there’s a secret to Hi-Fi Rush’s success, then, it’s simply going above and beyond how Unreal Engine 4 works by default to ensure that any shaders or assets that could come up during gameplay are cached before the game asks for them. Other developers, like The Ascent’s creative director Tor Frick, have previously lamented how the PSO caching misses Niagara effects and also doesn’t work for raytracing shaders.

Valve is actually doing something similar at the system level for the Steam Deck, which is why Elden Ring was actually less stuttery on the Deck than on PC when it launched last year. “We have a unique GPU/driver combination to target, and the majority of the shaders that you run locally are actually pre-built on servers in our infrastructure,” Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told Digital Foundry. “When the game is trying to issue a shader compile through its graphics API of choice, those are usually skipped, as we find the pre-compiled cache entry on disk.”

More games, especially Unreal Engine 4 ones, need to make sure their shaders aren’t slipping through the cache. As for players—as frustrating as it can be to run into a lengthy shader compilation load when you boot up a new game, just grab a snack and remember you’re facing the lesser of two evils. 

The video covers all the basics, from the usual resource gathering and early construction to setting up trade missions with nearby cities. It also shows off the “completely redesigned” UI in Pharaoh: A New Era, which is aimed at simplifying the job of building and managing cities, and of course the new and improved visuals—it’s been a quarter century since the original, after all, and while that’s not exactly ancient in a civilizational context, it’s pretty old as far as videogame graphics go.

Also interesting, and kind of amusing (to me, at least), is the fact that all the remade buildings in Pharaoh: A New Era were “carefully evaluated by a certified Egyptologist to ensure the game’s historical accuracy.” I have to assume that commitment to accuracy is specifically in relation to the game’s architecture, and not the parts where you have to, for instance, ensure the gods don’t get pissed off at your poor management skills.

All told, Pharaoh: A New Era looks like a fairly straightforward city builder, with the usual array of building upgrades, fickle population, and various sorts of crises to deal with. There are a few promised twists, though, not least of which is that along with keeping your people happy, you’ll also need to keep your boss happy: Pharaoh (the guy, not the game) has certain expectations of you, and likely won’t take it well if you screw up the job.

To help you avoid any bad outcomes, Dotemu and developer Triskell Interactive have served up 10 helpful hints to get things going. Some of this stuff is pretty obvious, especially if you played the original, but it never hurts to have these things spelled out: It’s amazing how often things go sideways because people gloss over the first step, “Read and understand the mission briefing and the win and defeat conditions.” (That applies to real life as much as videogames, by the way.)

🐪 Read and understand the mission briefing and the win and defeat conditions

One of the first things you absolutely need to focus on when starting to play Pharaoh: A New Era is the mission briefing that will sum up the main objectives to achieve and how to avoid defeat. 

🐪 Place your first plots of housing

It all starts with the construction of plots of housing to populate the unoccupied lands of your future empire. Place the first housing to provide migrants with a suitable place to live.

🐪 Access to water is the key

It’s important to place wells nearby their households in other words on lands with underlying groundwater.

🐪 Services you’ll need to guarantee the safety of your citizens and workers

Build an architect’s office as well as a fire station to prevent any fire or collapse. Other useful services will be available later on.

🐪 Local trade and exploitation of the kingdom’s resources

Build hunting lodges to hunt the wild animals that populated the kingdom’s lands and deliver the meat to the granaries, granaries to preserve the meat and deliver it to distributors, and a bazaar to guarantee distribution to your citizens.

🐪 Recruit and keep an eye on the % of unemployment

If you do not pay attention to the % of unemployment, a shortage of workers is to be expected. 

🐪 Make the kingdom prosper

Develop local trade in order to make the kingdom prosper and develop the services to improve the standard of living and well-being of your citizens

🐪 Enhance the desirability rate of the kingdom

Develop entertainment (juggling or dancing schools etc.), build temples and shrines in honor of the gods, and embellish the city with gardens or ornate paving stones to contribute to the desirability of the city. 

🐪 Keep the Gods pleased

If they aren’t worshipped enough, your city will suffer the wrath of the gods. 

🐪 Hold a festival in honor of the Gods

Festivals temporarily improve the gods’ mood and increase your chances of getting your kingdom blessed. 

And now you know. Pharaoh: A New Era is set to launch on Steam (opens in new tab) on February 15.