iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 11/09/2026

Donated as promised and requested an employer match to 2x the impact. Get your card before they sell out! #RDC26 You can help provide life-saving services by funding The Trevor Project’s mission to end suicide among LGBTQ+ youth. give.thetrevorproject.org/boatbomber

011

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 25/08/2026

At the end of the blog post, you'll find the links to the playground place, the GitHub repo, and Wally package. Here's a taste of some of the visualizations. Go check it out! (bsky can't use multiple videos, so I can only show images here. There are even cooler video visuals in the blog!)

030

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 25/08/2026

My #Roblox liquid glass effect is open sourced on my blog! www.boatbomber.com/blog/liquid-... I break down how it works, the decisions I made, plus there's cool visualizations that make it easy to understand. No math/code, I swear. Pretty demos and fun problem solving. Give it a read!

181

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 16/08/2026

Not attending RDC this year, or want to chip in beyond the cards? You can donate directly here: give.thetrevorproject.org/boatbomber I just made a $300 donation to start us off. Let's make a difference for someone who needs it.

010

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 16/08/2026

This #RDC, DynaDex is selling boatbomber trading cards signed by yours truly! The proceeds of all 17 signed boatbomber holos go to The Trevor Project, and I'm matching that. $50 card = $100 donated. I slipped some extra goodies in the bags too🤫

241

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 13/08/2026

I found some great resources that helped me make my liquid glass even better and look closer to Apple's style :)

130

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 12/08/2026

I might do a technical writeup on www.boatbomber.com/blog in the future that breaks down how this works with some peeks behind the curtain

010

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 12/08/2026

Liquid glass in #Roblox! Frosted glass is just so 2007. Total control over the material. (Shape, chromatic aberration, displacement, specular, lighting, etc.) Should I release this? It's a neat tech demo (ran at ~190 FPS in this video) but isn't viable for real games.

230

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 10/08/2026

I revived my old GlassmorphicUI to use the latest EditableImage APIs and make it a lot more performant. #RobloxDev github.com/boatbeaker/G...

2111

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 15/07/2026

Occlusion culling in CullThrottle! #RobloxDev In this stress test, everything is throttled since our update budget can't update thousands of visible blocks. By skipping occluded objects, we spend our update budget more wisely, leading to much higher refresh rates!

260

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 07/04/2025

This popped into my head and I had to make it

000

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 10/03/2025

This work would have wasted over an hour of my time, and now it took 2 minutes to generate plus another 10 to check the work. Anyone still doing grunt work is wasting their time. LLMs are absolutely good enough to do the grunt work (at least in popular languages like JS and Python).

020

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 09/03/2025

I've become a daily Claude Extended user. I write quick+messy code until I've proven my idea, then I have Claude turn it into neat classes and unit tests. This allows me to focus on the real logic and ideas, instead of focusing on writing clean+performant code. Huge velocity boost.

130

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 22/02/2025

The funniest part of this project was trying to convince models to output reasoning that links the prompt to the existing code from the original dataset. My solution is to gaslight them and tell the model that it already wrote it but it needs to be rewritten.

030

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 22/02/2025

I'm building a synthetic reasoning dataset using the open Luau corpus from Roblox! I want to fine tune reasoning models to generate Luau code. I will open source this dataset, the code used to build it, and the model weights if I get a good fine tune model.

1100

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 12/01/2025

"I hope they play Hot To Go" "This is a Hank Green post?" :

030

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 15/12/2024

Benchmarker v7.3.0 is out! #RobloxDev - Adds BeforeAll, AfterAll, BeforeEach, and AfterEach functions - Profiler usage inside of iterations will now display meaningfully in the flamegraph

1171

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 08/12/2024

The first release candidate for CullThrottle is now available to try! #RobloxDev Please send me any feedback or bug reports! Github: github.com/boatbomber/C... Wally: wally.run/package/boat...

2356

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 30/11/2024

CullThrottle now has dynamic render distance! #RobloxDev (Can be disabled if you want specific control) It will adjust the distance to ensure you're staying within the allocated time budget and desired refresh rates!

5333

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 28/11/2024

CullThrottle will find the optimal balance of visuals/perf in the current scene for your hardware. Give it a budget (ms) + a minimum & target refresh rate, and it determines what to update each frame for the best visuals in the budget. It'll even go above your target if it's in budget.

3232

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 16/11/2024

it's true, i'm 6'9" here's a pic of us for reference

010

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 02/11/2024

Make a change, get roasted.

330

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 02/11/2024

You work your hardest when trying to prove someone wrong- so I made Roastjo, a Rojo fork that roasts your changes as you sync them. #RobloxDev #Roblox 🔊

2345

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 28/10/2024

I'm having fun though, solid game. It's pretty much exactly what you expect from a CoD BO game

040

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

Decided to attempt a dynamic fluid simulation! It's far from perfect (or even correct, tbh) but I still enjoyed making and playing with it. Fun weekend project! #RobloxDev #Roblox (Arrows are flow, color is pressure, black arrow is obstacle) (Originally posted Apr 9, 2023)

0140

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

I love open source. I needed AWS header signing in Lua so I looked around to see if someone else made it- they did, and credited me. Something I open sourced years ago enabled others to build things that came full circle to help me now. What a beautiful ecosystem. #RobloxDev

0170

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

Fun fact: @lualearning.org is in the 0th percentile for monetization. You're damn right we are. (Source: new Roblox analytics dashboard)

1100

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

I'll give you a bonus: the worst (best?) timed photo of my panel

080

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

I waited a few days to post my #RDC24 photos so that they can lift you from the post-convention-depression ❤️

2130

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

RDC Red Carpet photos are the best thing they've added to RDC 😍

090

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

I got in too deep- I was reading archived mathematicians' email threads from the 1980s & barely legible scanned textbook PDFs. The result of all that effort was totally worth it. I could watch this all day. It's so fast, this entire demo is a few hundred microseconds per frame.

060

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

Added support to CullThrottle for getting objects in view, without distance throttling. #RobloxDev Super useful in many cases, like object pooling where you release objects into the pool when they go out of view.

120

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

I'm working on CullThrottle, a system for efficiently handling updates to thousands of objects. #RobloxDev Built on the tech that makes WindShake possible, it makes it easy to run your effects at high FPS by managing which objects you should update each frame. (Originally posted Jul 28, 2024)

1111

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

You can also do non-spherical shapes if you want something truly bizarre!

020

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

There's so much tuning you can do! The curvature of the glass, the transparency level, the placement of the blue/red layers, etc. Go wild! It can get pretty trippy, just make sure to avoid getting motion sick!

130

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

Finally, a tiny bit of code to put them in front of the camera each frame!

110

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

Then we have an inverted half-sphere mesh with Glass material. By adding a transparent Highlight to it and setting the mesh transparency > 1, it causes some visual distortion.

110

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

The top layer is a black Neon plane with a hole. Neon black has no specular lighting, which makes it perfect for filling the screen. Next comes slightly offset blue and red planes, giving the edges a bit of pseudo chromatic aberration. Here's what that looks like so far:

110

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

Now for the breakdown! This effect has very little code, and instead uses layers of meshes with Neon and Glass material. Here are the physical parts of the effect, displayed in an exploded view for clarity:

120

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

I made a "fish eye" lens effect on #Roblox! #RobloxDev Details and open source in replies 👇 (Originally posted May 24, 2023)

1111

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

It had to be done. #Roblox #RobloxDev You can now check the $RBLX stock from in Roblox. 😎 (Originally posted March 11, 2021)

071

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

Another fun horror menu! #RobloxDev #Roblox This is my version of the menu in Welcome To The Game 2. (Originally posted Jun 25, 2019)

050

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

Dynamic real time water interactions and simulation. Jokes aside, this was so painful to do. Took me nearly 2 hours to make this useless thing. 😅 #RobloxDev #Roblox (Originally posted Jul 14, 2020)

090

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

Joining the #Roblox trend Avatar vs Owner

050

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

Here's the result of today's #RobloxDev Twitch stream @ www.twitch.tv/boatbomber Roddit. (Originally posted Feb 15, 2021)

130

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

ViewportFrame replays. #RobloxDev #Roblox Made for fun, no actual use. Module supports going to frames or percent of the recording. Demo slider uses :GoToPercent() (Originally posted Aug 5, 2019)

051

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

Here you go, open source and easy to use! #RobloxDev Now your #Roblox experience can look like a #retro game! Model & Instructions: roblox.com/library/7798... (Originally posted Oct 21, 2021)

161

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

I DID IT! I FINALLY DID IT! I BROKE QUADRUPLE DIGIT FPS IN LUA LEARNING!!! FPS : 1058.1/s #Roblox #RobloxDev #Optimization (Originally posted Oct 3, 2021)

030

Zack Williams @boatbomber.com · 20/10/2024

Google Docs? OneDrive? Sorry professor, I store and share my documents as #Roblox models 🙌🏻😤

040