An IDL compiler written in Luau for ROBLOX buffer networking.

You describe your events and the shape of their data in a .blink schema; the compiler generates server, client and shared Luau modules that pack them into buffers, validate what arrives, and batch what leaves.

This fork

BlinkBlox was called Blink until 0.28.0, and some things keep that name on purpose, because games and places depend on them: schemas are still .blink files, the remotes are still BLINK_RELIABLE_REMOTE and BLINK_UNRELIABLE_REMOTE, and the Studio plugin still generates into a Blink folder and keeps schemas in ServerStorage.BLINK_CONFIGURATION_FILES. A server and a client built before and after the rename still talk to each other.

This is a maintained fork. Upstream stopped taking changes on this line of the compiler and moved to a rewrite, leaving reported defects — including an unbounded parse of hostile client input — closed as out of scope. This fork fixes them and continues from there.

Hardened

• Inbound packets are bounded. A client used to be able to send buffer.create(1000000) and make the server decode up to a million events inside one remote callback. Packet size, decoded-event count and instance references are now capped, an unrecognised event id stops the parse, and a truncated packet — which is smaller than a legitimate one, so no size limit catches it — is contained rather than raising out of the remote handler. Tunable per schema.
• No more resurrected players. A remote function whose listener yielded while its player left wrote that player back into the replication map, where nothing removed them again: the server then allocated a buffer and fired a remote at someone who had gone, every Heartbeat, forever. Fixed on all three write paths, with a second line of defence that heals a stale entry on the next frame.

Fixed

• Instance classes containing a digit (Instance(Vector3Value), Instance(Motor6D)) now parse.
• Edit-mode stubs keep the shape of the real API, so Roblox stories no longer raise on On returning nil, on Iter returning nil, or on a missing StepReplication.
• The CLI works from scripts: the schema path is the first non-flag argument in any order, and a missing output directory is created rather than blocking on a prompt no one can answer.
• TypesOutput resolves against the output path rather than the schema's, so an absolute schema path no longer scatters the types module into the working directory.
• Documentation code blocks are readable in light mode.

Added

• Predict delivers an event to the listening side's own handlers without touching a remote — for tests, and for stories where remotes do not exist. It mirrors the receive path, queue included.
• Inbound limit options: MaxPacketSize, MaxEventsPerPacket, MaxInstancesPerPacket.

Kept honest

Zero lint warnings and zero type errors across the tree, enforced by CI and git hooks that run formatting, linting, whole-project type-checking and the test suite. None of these gates existed before: pull requests ran no checks at all, and the test suite could not run unattended because it aborted on an interactive prompt.

Performance

BlinkBlox aims to generate the most performant and bandwidth-efficient code for your specific experience. Lower bandwidth usage translates directly into lower ping* for players, and the generated serialisers cost less CPU than a generalised networking library.

Benchmarks are available here.

* Compared to standard ROBLOX networking. Not guaranteed in every case, but it should never make ping worse.

Security

Two things work against bad actors:

1. Data sent by clients is validated on the receiving side before it reaches game code, and the volume of that data is now bounded before any of it is parsed.
2. Compression makes traffic considerably harder to snoop on than plain remotes.

Getting started

rokit add XopoIII/BlinkBlox blinkblox

Then head to the documentation.

Credits

Originally written by Axen; this fork continues from v0.18.8 and remains MIT licensed.

Credits to Zap for the range and array syntax. Credits to ArvidSilverlock for the float16 implementation. Studio plugin auto completion icons are sourced from Microsoft and are under the CC BY 4.0 license. Speed icons created by alkhalifi design - Flaticon