Nothing like a 10 minute fix blocked by 3 weeks of bureaucracy.
Briefs
Low-effort content for certain microblogging platforms.
Added builds for rbxfile-dump/dcomp.
If you use Remodel and are interested in rbxmk, I wrote a document comparing the two:
https://github.com/Anaminus/rbxmk/blob/imperative/doc/examples/remodel/README.md
rbxmk v0.9.1 is released.
Refuting bullshit is a full time job.
Responsive design is easy! Just start with the smallest possible size, then scale up to fit the viewport.
“I’ll just make my own web-compatible bitmap font. It will be easy.”
How do I strangle software?
Using skinned meshes instead of parts to reduce the part count for Boatbomber’s ViewportCanvas. Unfortunately, the initial rendering takes way too long to be feasible.
Given an array of integers representing the widths of table columns, here is a formula that decides in-place whether a column is considered significantly larger than the others. I use this to decide whether a column should be scaled down to allow the table to fit a maximum width.
T := Sum(array)
L := Length(array)
i := array[index]
big := i/T > (1 - i/T) / (L-1)
It basically compares the proportion of the current column with the average proportion of the rest of the table.
Better formula:
i/T > (1 - i/T) / (L-1)
i/T * T > (1 - i/T) * T / (L-1)
i/T > (1*T - i/T * T) / (L-1)
i > (T - i) / (L-1)
Now I have a decent-looking but crudely-implemented way to render tables in the terminal.
If you don’t mind compiling them yourself, I have two tools for working with binary rbxl/rbxm files. The dump tool dumps the contents of a file in a readable format. The dcomp tool receives a file and outputs the same file with uncompressed chunks.
A repository for specifications of Roblox’s file formats. Featuring a mostly complete draft of the rbxl format.
I’d love to see how many garbage union assets Studio has uploaded on my behalf.
Me, who types in a separate editor and pastes the result into chat out of spite for the typing status.
The format of the UniqueId type for rbxl and rbxlx files.
// Binary format.
type UniqueId struct {
// All big-endian.
Sequence uint32
Timestamp uint32
Random int64 // Zigzag encoded
}
// Interleaved
// XML hash
//
// [random ][time ][seq ]
// 0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef
//
// Not zigzag encoded!
Boring Facts: UniqueId has one more sequential component that increments every time an instance is created. If this value manages to overflow, the timestamp component is updated. To generate a duplicate ID, you would have to produce over 4 billion instances within 1 second.
Boring Facts: The number returned by GetDebugId is a signed 32-bit integer that will overflow if more than 2^31 instances have been created.
Boring Facts: The UniqueId type also contains an apparently random sequence of
bytes. However, between serialization in the binary and XML formats, there is a
shift by one bit. It is possible that this is an implementation error. There
turns out to be no errors. When naively comparing the bytes of the two formats,
they appear to be shifted by one bit. The reason is that, in XML, the random
portion is converted directly to bytes. But in the binary format, zigzag
encoding is used.
Boring Facts: The UniqueId type found in Roblox place files contains a timestamp with the epoch set at 2021-01-01. This can be used to determine when an instance was created, per studio session.
Quick way to grab the nearest ScreenGui from a descendant script:
local screen = script:FindFirstAncestorWhichIsA("ScreenGui")
Very excited about how rbxmk documentation is coming together. All of it is compiled with the program, so it can be explored from the terminal. The endgame is to be able to export the entire collection of files to be used for generating a documentation website.
Don’t abstract until you actually need to.
I hear font licensing is even worse than music licensing. Can’t wait for custom fonts!
DST ended my alarm clock’s streak of flashing on and off with the correct time.
With this commit, built-in rbxmk documentation is finally readable again. Formatting text is frustrating. There’s lots of comments because I barely know how it works.
https://github.com/Anaminus/rbxmk/commit/857c0dac32b1dbace20ddcb370563f2d0824b16a
I could do a release, but I’m kind of waiting for Go 1.18 to drop.
I spent 1/10 uploads on this. You’d better appreciate it.
Protip: Search for GlobalSettings_13.xml in your file system. This contains
settings for Studio. If you set the “LocalAssetsFolder” setting to a directory,
files in that directory can be accessed through rbxasset://. Use this to work
on audio before uploading it.
Wrote a quick and dirty rbxmk script to download a list of audio assets:
https://github.com/Anaminus/rbxmk/blob/imperative/doc/examples/download-audio.rbxmk.lua
There goes my carefully curated list of Arsenal megaphone spam.
If you’re having trouble getting rbxmk to covert rbxm to rbxmx correctly, it’s probably to do with Roblox’s API dump missing certain serialized properties. I’ve created a patch file that will add such properties back to the dump.
https://github.com/Anaminus/rbxmk/tree/imperative/doc/examples/dump-patch
Getting text to wrap correctly is surprisingly difficult. I scream internally at the thought of having to deal with double-width characters.
You can tell that a microsoft product is involved when the install process takes 200 times longer than it should.