Peter McNeill @MrChickenRocket Twitter profile

Pinned Tweet

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 year

Quote retweet with four projects you’ve worked on.

Steve ✦ Lowtwait

@Lowtwait

1 year

Quote retweet with four projects you’ve worked on. I’m so grateful to have been part of these.

6

1

203

15

5

194

Last Seen Profiles

@1AttDAO

@chapmxnss

@IIJ_doumae

@TbarkRady

@StuReynoldsMD

@creo_contact

@centarska_picka

@c1m2p

@_Toorauz

@AngelaDutc24883

@SebeNkambule

@MARUTOKU9

@M7madal5aldii

@kenzv__adn

@angelashi__

@marusyashikilin

@gYK3uye4ZBEl1IQ

@BlueAce1878

@CutSonicClips

@Peurvhae

@TheFactFindr

@nikocoliterus

@JGSDF_YTS_X7

@KasihLudah

@omertost

@IamAsimm7

@EmmaMizfit

@DonaldCourter

@vera_jeraldin

@autonomy2017

@mireiamusquera

@SerialDesiN25

@Muratpass1

@intqey

@mattkandela

@jandakembangstw

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

4 years

Simulated water in Roblox, now with correct lighting! This is a bit of an abuse of the skinned mesh system and the glass material, but honestly it runs pretty well for a small puddle like this. #roblox #robloxdev

94

119

2K

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

7 months

Projected surface appearance decals :D I'm going to release this as a plugin + SDK maybe before christmas. Runs good. #robloxdev

60

130

1K

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

4 years

OK last water gif, I promise! It's been optimized it a bunch and the normal calculations are fixed now. I don't have any project ideas in mind for this though! Still, stunning engineering by the roblox devs - I never expected dynamic bones to be so performant.

22

48

814

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

7 months

OK, I got super distracted lol. So this is 150 other player cars with proper server side collision, running at less than 40KB/s. What could you make with 150 players all driving cars? #robloxdev

35

37

689

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

10 months

Tip 25: With some code, you can make particles "Always On Top" by abusing their ZOffset property and a call to WorldToViewportPoint. See here: #robloxdev

8

39

627

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 year

My new scene management tools for roblox also includes a heatmap tool. This helps you diagnose where the heavy areas in your scene are - optimise these first etc etc. It can be configured to show you an estimated triangle density, part density, or drawcall density! #RobloxDev

29

43

589

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

4 years

Experimenting with fully dynamic water in Roblox (Springs for simulation, bones for rendering). Unfortunately it doesn't look like the roblox skinned mesh rendering updates its normals correctly?? Right now the shading doesn't change at all :( #roblox #robloxdev

15

42

564

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

3 years

'Final' version of the twilight princess portal effect! It's super satisfying to jump through, too. #robloxdev

23

36

524

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

7 months

I feel like I have a reputation to maintain at this point, so here's my massive EditableMeshes flex - a new decal system that I think is going to revolutionize your roblox builds. Wait til you see this sucker in action... #robloxdev

20

27

540

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

Can you guess what I'm making? A* pathfinding on thousands of server-owned entities. No parallel luau yet, ended up not needing it! #robloxdev

31

28

457

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

10 months

Heads up! Do your Roblox servers leak memory? If you're using :LoadCharacter() you need to be calling player.Character:Destroy() manually, or you *will* leak memory on both client and server. I've seen many top games with this exact bug in the past few weeks. #roblox #robloxdev

24

25

415

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

6 months

A small slice of my Roblox 2023 side projects, in gif form! 🧵 1) Roblox added support for scaling models so I grabbed a unity asset pack full of dinosaurs to test it out... (January) #robloxdev

32

11

394

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

3 years

A roblox tip! You can make elevators and other kinematics with anchored parts by just correctly setting the velocity each frame. The blue one is coded to set a velocity each heartbeat. #robloxdev

6

42

368

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

3 years

Roblox is the most criminally underrated platform by game developers that I’ve ever seen. Watching the “real game industry” be dismissive towards it is almost comical. The ‘low quality’ of games on it is because they’re being made by literal children. The tech itself is nuts!

24

29

357

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 year

Fun little experiment tonight - 90's zelda style sunflares! Figured out how to do ~screenspace particles, too. The code is uncopylocked here: #robloxdev

8

25

334

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

10 months

Tip 24: You can create a single permanent "quad" particle for things like glows around lights with the help of some code. To do this, set Enabled to false on the emitter, and then on renderStepped call :Clear() and :Emit(1) to recreate the particle every frame. #robloxdev

9

18

332

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 year

To celebrate the release of the roblox "model scale" property, here are too many dinosaurs. How many is too many? Probably this many. #robloxdev #roblox

17

27

320

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 year

Presenting: Software Occlusion Culling for Roblox in a real scene! Red boxes are manually placed "blockers" - Blue boxes are buildings that can't be seen and so are not drawn. Costs 2-3ms, saves millions of tris. Conservative fill routines made this tricky. #robloxdev

11

19

309

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

5 months

Multi-stage LOD for a building using the roblox vis tools. 18k tris -> 5k tris -> few hundred tris. Great job @xRicey_ ! You can spot the LOD1->LOD2 transition pretty easily, but the LOD0->LOD1 is spot on, imho. Roblox's lighting changes are way more noticable. #RobloxDev

9

23

279

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

Canvasgroups are pretty powerful! #robloxdev

12

9

282

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

3 years

I made some level editing tools inspired by Super Mario 3D Land. It tries hard to build on the grid even if you rotate stuff! #roblox #robloxdev

12

27

274

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

3 years

I set out to make a plugin that could "make" mario-esque levels and I think it's about done! It fills your simple parts in with "good" geometry, and does holes, merging, rotation, colors, and now fences. Maybe I should just sell this on its own? #roblox #robloxdev

15

24

256

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

3 years

A visualization of how my experimental cheat-proof player controller works in Roblox. The orange marker is where the server has last validated your input, the yellow markers are re-simulated frames, green are locally predicted frames, and blue is the final result! #robloxdev

17

18

253

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 year

It's still in early access but I adore the hecking heck out of this game. It's just so classy and does so many things so so right. I hope Roblox promotes the pants off this when it releases - this is frankly Nintendo quality stuff and I don't say that lightly. #roblox

Find Everything

@FindEverythang

1 year

The Find Everything v0.2.0 update is headed your way! #roblox #robloxdev #3Dplatformer Watch the trailer below:

140

867

5K

5

17

252

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

I'm sure twitter compression will trash this, but v1.2 of lamplight is coming along. In-engine baked radiosity in roblox! #robloxdev

11

13

239

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 year

Ever wondered how I did the dynamic water showcase? Well, I've uncopylocked it! Couple of notes about it: #RobloxDev

5

22

235

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

7 months

Here's a simple trick now that we have editable meshes! Raycast down from each vertex position on your water mesh, and lerp between two vertex colors based on distance. Instant shallows! #robloxdev

7

228

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

5 years

Well, pretty happy with how this has turned out. Completely custom collision detection and physics. Variable jump height. No weird glitchy roblox physics. #robloxdev

15

6

196

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 year

Inspired by the amazing Find Everything, I wrote some code to rotate your player to stand on slopes, as well as lean into the corners when you're turning. It's a super juicy and fun effect for not much effort! #robloxdev

13

217

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

7 months

Grinding away on the Pro Decals UI. It's just about ready but of course I can't release this until it leaves the studio beta. Hey @Roblox , how's that new fiat plugin storefront coming? #robloxdev

9

15

217

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

11 months

Magic Roblox Numbers: A part costs about 0.9KB of memory Parts replicate at about 10,000 a second - use this to predict join times A 1024x1024 SurfaceAppearance is about 2MB on mobile If you go over 1200MB client ram you're likely to get ejected even from 2gb phones. #robloxdev

3

10

199

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 year

Watch the distant building! Detail objects like lights and decals now fade in and out nicely. Demo map coming soon... #robloxdev #roblox

7

187

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

8 months

LETS GOOOOO @robloxdev

22

11

188

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 month

Have you ever wanted to have dangly extra physics bits like tails or bunny ears or keychains on your character in Roblox? There's a small trick to it, but it's easy once you know how! They also replicate to other players properly...🧵 #robloxdev

5

2

187

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

3 years

I've made a simulator for people who don't like simulators! Like and retweet lets gooo! Release code: LAUNCHPARTY #roblox #robloxdev

Shovel Simulator

Check out Shovel Simulator. It’s one of the millions of unique, user-generated 3D experiences created on Roblox. Shovel simulator is a game where you dig up stuff to sell it. Money is used to buy...

www.roblox.com

25

36

178

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

10 months

This gigachad pounding out code during the keynote! #RDC2023

7

5

183

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

3 years

So! Here's a little "Cheat sheet" I put together that helps me think about how to place UI in my roblox projects. Might be helpful to others! #robloxdev #roblox #ui

7

47

172

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

I'm an older engine guy who's worked on some of the biggest games in the world. I could still be in that world, but Roblox has let me reboot my career as a (well paid!) indy game dev. I am literally living my dreams right now because of this platform! #RobloxDev

7

10

177

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 year

Presenting: Roblox's city test map, optimised! It uses a combination of software occlusion culling and distance culling to massively chop the triangle count down. It has cool debug visualization keys too! #roblox #robloxdev

12

8

180

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

This is a sly one so watch close! The distant trees are being swapped for 2D baked billboard sprites, but the tree details match the rotation properly! I saw this recently in a clever zelda BoTW post, so I have recreated it for roblox. Big forests soon? #robloxdev

7

16

175

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

7 months

It's really fun sticking decals all over everything - but I bet you didn't expect it to have crazy good performance, too! I'm looking for some artists to get early access and collaborate on some decals so hit me up... #robloxdev #robloxprodecals

8

6

175

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

9 months

There should be a special place in marketing team hell if you show frame-lag in a promotional video.

PlayStation

@PlayStation

9 months

Millions of Roblox experiences are now on PlayStation 🔨

332

667

6K

12

1

174

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

Canvasgroups can be used to put gradients across multiple elements, making them look "combined". I do that here to make the goopy strokes, as well as the smooth even glow behind everything. #robloxdev

5

176

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

5 months

Guess whos been reading too many Isekai mangas lately? I am such a closet weeb. #robloxdev

7

6

167

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 year

Here we go! My Roblox Vis Tool SDK is now available for purchase over at: This is my first time I've ever sold software commercially - let's see how it goes... #roblox #robloxdev

Roblox Vis Tools by MrChickenRocket

Occlusion culling, distance culling, Model LOD and Scene Analysis for Roblox

mrchickenrocket.itch.io

14

17

160

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

Here's a video of real time occlusion culling in roblox! I had to write some *very strange* polygon fill routines to make this work. The resolution doesn't even need to be very high for this to be pretty useful, even a 40x20 grid works great. #robloxdev

5

10

154

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

13 days

Wake up, new roblox templates dropped! Kudos to whomever at roblox put these together, they're both excellent. Idiomatic code, sensible levels of security, cool art assets. Good jorb! #roblox #robloxdev

2

8

163

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 year

I ran some of the free roblox tree assets through my imposter generator. The transition between quad and model isn't perfect, but it's not terrible either. The lighting is fully dynamic. I'll be commercially offering this sometime soon so keep an eye out! #robloxdev #roblox

3

7

158

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

3 years

Why have portals when you can have twilight mirrors?! #robloxdev

6

11

149

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

New place who dis? #robloxdev

6

18

144

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

3 years

Well, this is completely over-engineered lol. The cows now have a flow map so they can wander around during the day, and then understand how to take a nice path "towards home" at any point. I wanted to make roblox flow maps NPCs for a while, so this was worth it! #robloxdev

5

8

146

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

9 months

I made an update to the Roblox Vis Tools SDK to correctly support moving objects, including other player characters! The other player is still "there" but they're not costing anything to draw anymore at range. The fade out is optional... #robloxdev

5

7

145

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 year

There are no tree meshes in this screenshot - they're all just quads/imposters. Getting them to light correctly was some effort! I'll be releasing the tooling around this as part of my upcoming SDK release, so stay tuned! #roblox #robloxdev

7

4

140

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 year

Soon: A fully recursive region and portal visibility system for roblox. A lot of effort has gone into making this easy for artists to set up and debug, including optional automatic portal generation. Can't wait to show it off! #robloxdev

6

9

139

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

Its crazy how good roblox is when you just want to jam together an experiment. This was about 2 hours start to finish. #robloxdev

8

10

136

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 year

Roblox advanced tip update: A fix went out so parenting anything under a camera on the server now 100% stops it replicating to players, while still simulating and colliding correctly on the server. Allows for custom replication of things like Npcs, car rigs, etc. Huge! #robloxdev

12

5

136

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

3 years

WHAT IS HAPPENING! *PANICS* #shovelsimulator #robloxdev

18

3

127

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

Work on the completely custom humanoid replacement "chickynoid" continues! Seeing the concepts are based on quake 3, why not add jump pads? #RobloxDev

5

14

132

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 year

I'm building tooling to allow you to generate any mesh you want inside roblox studio, similar to what's allowed in Unity. Automatically generated vertex normals, vertex colors, tangents and UVs are now working :) You'll be able to do a lot more than just terrain... #robloxdev

7

9

130

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

3 years

Now the happy cows can wander around using barely any data! You can ride on them, too :D #robloxdev

4

9

129

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

How rude! Now the NPCs shove each other out of the way! On the code side I'm proud of how elegant this turned out to be - the server paths don't have to care if anyone is in the way, and the shoving effect is entirely local. Sort of a boids/A* hybrid approach. #robloxdev

2

7

126

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

10 months

Thanks for the swag #rdc but now I have another problem… (that’s my suitcase lol)

8

0

126

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 year

An alternate heatmap, this one is for drawcalls. There's a cafe inside that building that has a lot of unique materials on plates and cups. I'm really not sure how useful this tool would be for most devs - how much should I be charging for this? #robloxdev

11

1

120

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 months

SurfaceAppearance.Color ! They batch, too. #robloxdev

Yasu Yoshida

@mvyasu

2 months

Looks like I should probably pick back up a tree pack project that I was working on last year. #RobloxDev #Roblox

13

11

225

8

4

126

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 year

And here is a whole forest full of them! This never goes over about 200k tris for the trees even though there's a few million source triangles. Good LODs are important! #robloxdev

6

122

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

The amazing are sponsoring development of my open source roblox anticheat humanoid replacement. This is insanely generous of them - what a gift to the community! I can't wait to build some cheater free roblox games... #robloxdev

GitHub - easy-games/chickynoid: A server-authoritative networking character controller for Roblox.

A server-authoritative networking character controller for Roblox. - easy-games/chickynoid

github.com

9

14

118

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

Ever wish you could just CFrame objects around on the server and have it work smoothly AND with full physics? Well, TADA! :) This module makes scripting interactable objects like elevators, moving platforms and doors a breeze. Happy holidays! #robloxdev

6

5

119

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

Nice looking game :D #robloxdev

3

7

110

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

Debug visualization of chickynoid's terrain collision detection convex hulls. It's extracting and creating this data in realtime from just the voxel occupancy field, and it's getting pretty speedy now! #robloxdev

5

10

114

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

4 years

I made a little hot-tub so people could play with the water. #roblox #robloxdev

10

6

105

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 months

Three floppa friends in a ball. If they were not friends before they probably are now! Bunch of things going on here but the main takeaway is this isn't faked - the physics are running for real here and they really are flopping around in there. #RobloxDev

3

5

114

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 month

I thought this was such a cute idea I had to do it! The color changes stick around, too. #robloxdev

1

2

111

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

3 years

Why did MrChicken win an award? Because he was outstanding in his field!

6

4

105

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

Parallax background are go! Also visible is the double jump. #robloxdev

4

11

101

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

Dear Roblox, I have been good this year. For Christmas please let me use ViewportFrames and CanvasGuis as textures. I could make forests with 1000's of trees using imposters, or runtime texture atlasing, or animated materials. Please do not send coal. #robloxdev

2

9

103

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

10 months

Tip 20: Player.PlayerGui is a magic folder. Anything parented to it on the server will only replicate to that player. This is how player UI works, but you can also custom replicate anything to just one player. Once it turns up on the client, reparent it to the scene! #robloxdev

7

1

104

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

3 years

@ejknoodles Thank you! Was a fun little wind down doing some scribbles with these.

1

3

101

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

Here it is! An alpha release of my Global Illumination plugin for roblox. #robloxdev #roblox

7

10

99

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

Still working away on the roblox global illumination plugin. This is "voxel lighting" with no roblox ambient light set, just the global illumination and a tiny bit of sunshine. Updates in realtime! #robloxdev

4

7

97

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

4 months

It's embarrassing hearing supposedly seasoned game devs looking Roblox and going "These are bad games but kids play them anyway". Just admit you don't know your craft as well as you think you do, and stop gatekeeping.

7

4

102

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

I was at a dev meet the other night, talking about the stigma around Roblox and how shitty some devs are about it. But a veteran dev made a cracker of a point "Well Unity as a platform isn't exactly doing great in terms of press, but we're not going around shaming unity devs..."

9

4

97

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

8 months

Work on the "stupid cat game" continues. The cats now walk and stand up using somewhat accurate physics. Seeing it's just meant to be a dumb ragdoll game this is more than Good Enough™ #robloxdev

5

6

99

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

10 months

Tip 13: Decals are performance hogs; not only do they cause all geometry they are applied to to render twice(!!), they also cost a whole drawcall each. Use them very sparingly, consider using meshparts with surfaceappearances for the “fast path” #robloxdev

5

94

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

14 days

I’ll be giving a talk at RDC about how I approach using the Roblox tools to analyze and optimize builds. One thing I was thinking of was doing a shorter talk and then doing some live audience profiling of real games. Does this sound interesting?

7

1

93

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

11 months

An idea I had tonight: procedurally generated cats. This is longcat, with longtail. Maybe it could be like snek, except you just eat, hang out in the sun, get fat, and knock things off tables. Custom replication makes this work *way* better than expected... #robloxdev

7

2

92

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

8 months

Tip 34: Advanced networking tip - Roblox uses 100ms of buffer for interpolating client positions (sent at 20hz, fwiw). You probably don't need to know this, but if you're making a lag compensation system for a shooter, this is your magic offset number. #robloxdev

2

92

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

Still plodding away on Super Obby Maker. This shows off block breaking, blocks with items in them, and a "goomba" analog, the slime! Mario is a really good starting point for a toolkit based game, but there is a lot of original ideas coming, too... #robloxdev #superobbymaker

2

14

90

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 year

Procedural mesh generation in editor is go! I threw this together as a little experiment and it turned out great. Tempted to add a couple of bones to it to get that wiggle wiggle going... (10k tris) #robloxdev

3

6

90

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

This is the bounce lighting being turned on for the liminal pools test scene. Notice a bunch of probes get removed as they don't contribute anything, and also notice that the existing roblox cubemap-ambient and this seem to mix together really nicely :) #robloxdev

5

10

88

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

5 months

Out of morbid curiosity I tried manually batching together the buildings from "Modern City" with some tooling, dumping their contents into editable meshes and using vertex colors instead of part colors. Triplanar uvs are missing, but 160 draws reduced down to 20. Wild. #RobloxDev

6

0

87

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

6 months

Getting great results tonight while updating chickynoid to use latest techs. 100 player servers should be pretty comfortable now, even if everyone is at 144fps 🧵 #robloxdev

5

1

89

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

I've had this idea for a while... LuaU is fast, but is it fast enough to do a software rasterized depth buffer for occlusion culling? Heck yes it is! Rendering your major occluders into a depth buffer takes <1ms, and then anything behind those objects can be skipped. #robloxdev

4

11

86

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

9 months

Tip 29: There is a hidden "RUN" button on the test tab, that just launches the server without creating or connecting a client, and uses the studio camera exactly from where you left it. This is super useful if you're just working on server code or physics setups! #robloxdev

11

1

84

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

1 year

Hot Take: I don't think Roblox should ever do shader support, and it's naive to ask. You're not writing stable, performant shader code for *mobile* that supports skinning, instancing, shadows, fog, lights, etc etc. But they should add more materials like ToonShading... #robloxdev

18

4

84

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

2 years

This little dude is a mood. #robloxdev

5

3

80

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

6 months

11) Using editable meshes to render thousands and thousands of collectable tokens in a single drawcall. Inspired largely by petsim 99 and how laggy those little suckers are.

4

2

83

Peter McNeill

@MrChickenRocket

6 months

Getting close to the chickynoid 2.0 release. It's nice to get in and clean up a lot of this code. Changelist is getting quite fat! Several big algorithm changes in here means overall server performance is roughly 3x what it was before... #robloxdev

7

3

80