Roblox shows new 3D AI tool gunning for 'realtime creation integrated with gameplay'

The Roblox Developers Conference is underway, and at the keynote address CEO and co-founder David Baszucki came out all guns blazing. We're gonna have a billion daily users! 10% of all global gaming revenue! We already have your children! OK not the last one, though he might as well have, and you can read all about Roblox's rude health and even ruder goals here.

There was an element of pie-in-the-sky about some of the keynote. But one of the genuinely impressive touches came when Baszucki gave a flourish in the direction of AI, which Roblox has been gradually integrating into its creator development tools for years. It has a tool that helps automate creating textures, for example, but apparently we ain't seen nothing yet.

Roblox is developing an AI "3D foundational model" that will be open source and create 3D assets through text, video and 3D prompts. Baszucki describes this as an "incubation project" with around 40 dedicated employees, and says they're only three months down the road on it. He then shows an overhead view of a map being created through simple text prompts, then becoming a desert, then prompted into becoming a forest scene (with both a text and image prompt).

“We’ve been building generative AI into Roblox for years with tools like Assistant, Texture Generator, and Avatar Auto Setup. But these are just beginning to scratch the surface of what we have planned,” said Baszucki. "We see a powerful future where Roblox experiences have extensive generative AI capabilities to power real-time creation integrated with gameplay—in a resource-efficient way so we can make this available for everyone on the platform."

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The most intriguing promise is that idea of "realtime creation integrated with gameplay." These tools look impressive already (albeit in a stage demo), and Baszucki didn't put a timeframe on it, but if they can get there this is a leap forward in AI functionality for games that has enormous implications. Imagine a virtual D&D game where the world is coalescing into existence as the dungeon master describes it. OK, with Roblox graphics, but still.

As if this wasn't enough for the optimists among us, you could even tie-in the AI promises to a more sedate part of Baszucki's presentation. Improvements to the platform's backend and tech stack are not exactly headline news, even if things like improving app launch time, framerate and crash reduction make a big difference to players every day.

But Baszucki says the next stage in these "platform efforts" is making it possible for a developer "to host a high-performance, 100-player open world, sports or battle royale–type game on Roblox and have it run on 2 GB RAM devices anywhere in the world at good frame rates. We won’t stop until this is possible."

I'm still waiting for my flying car, but in the meantime I suppose taking part in 100-player experiences being created on-the-fly sounds totally awesome. It's the kind of feature that, if it wasn't in Roblox, would have most of us fulminating. Whether Roblox can deliver what it says it can, however, remains to be seen.

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."