The Lanes Bowling Ball Mesh & Texture Remaster

We've pushed a small update to The Lanes. Here's an overview of what we've done:

• The bowling ball model has been replaced with an optimized version.
• Updated and remastered all bowling ball textures to make them glossier and richer in color.
• Animated bowling ball return.
• Various small bug fixes.

Optimised Bowling Ball Model

The number of triangles is often a good measure of how difficult a model is to render, and our new mesh uses only 1296 triangles, down from 4338. The model also has a better texture mapping, so it’s easier for us to add new textures going forwards, and they map better to the ball, so straight lines are actually straight.

The Pride ball is a good demonstration of this, you can see the lines aren't great on the old ball with its previous texture! These are important qualities for us to be able to support user-created custom designs in-game soon.

We’ve also made the balls more shiny and richer in colour, to be a bit closer to a glossy bowling ball while still being easy to see the patterns.

Animated Ball Return

In this update we also added the first pass of an animated ball return. There’s some improvements we can make to this in the future, but hopefully this is a good first demo of what we have in mind.

When a game starts on a lane, the ball return will be cleared. As players take turns and bowl, after the ball has reached the end of the lane and the score is counted, it will return to the ball return rack.

The balls will stack up until full, after which when each bowler has selected their ball for their turn, the oldest ball will be removed from the return, the remaining three will roll into the next slot along to make space for the ball that's about to be thrown.

Available Now

Play the game now at thelanes.vip and let us know your thoughts on our Roblox community or our Discord server.

Happy bowling!