If you have spent any time messing around with Luau, you have probably thought about how to set up a basic roblox workspace esp to keep track of objects or players in your game environment. It is one of those "rite of passage" projects for anyone getting into game security research or just wanting to understand how the engine handles 3D-to-2D rendering. Honestly, once you understand how the workspace hierarchy functions, the mystery behind how people see through walls or track distant items kind of disappears.
Breaking down the basics
At its core, an ESP—which stands for Extra Sensory Perception—is just a way to display information that is usually hidden from the player's direct line of sight. In the context of Roblox, this almost always involves interacting with game.Workspace. This is the container where every physical part, mesh, and character model lives while the game is running. If it has a position in the 3D world, it is in the workspace.
To make an ESP work, you essentially need a script that constantly scans the workspace for specific things. Maybe you're looking for other players, or maybe you're looking for rare items spawned on the map. The script finds those objects, calculates where they are relative to your camera, and then draws something on your screen to highlight them. It sounds complicated, but Roblox actually gives us a few built-in tools that make this way easier than it used to be.
The magic of the Highlight object
Not too long ago, if you wanted to make a roblox workspace esp, you had to do some pretty heavy lifting with BoxHandleAdornment or messy BillboardGui setups. It worked, but it looked clunky and was a nightmare to optimize. Then Roblox introduced the Highlight instance, and everything changed.
The Highlight object is a godsend for this kind of thing. You can literally just parent a Highlight instance to a character model or a part in the workspace, and it creates a clean, glowing outline that is visible through walls by default (thanks to the DepthMode property). It is super efficient because the engine handles the rendering at a low level rather than you having to calculate screen coordinates every frame in a script.
If you are just starting out, using Highlights is definitely the way to go. You can change the FillColor, the OutlineColor, and how transparent the whole thing is. It is a very "plug and play" solution for visual tracking. The only downside is that there's a limit to how many Highlights can be active on the screen at once (usually around 31), so if you're trying to track a hundred items at once, you'll need a different approach.
Dealing with the math
If the Highlight object isn't enough for what you're trying to do—like if you want to show the distance to an object or draw lines (tracers) from the bottom of your screen to a target—you're going to have to get comfortable with some math. Specifically, you need to know about the WorldToViewportPoint function.
This function is a method of the Camera object. It takes a 3D position in the workspace and tells you exactly where that point would be on the player's 2D monitor. It also returns a boolean that tells you if the point is actually on the screen or if it's behind the player.
When you're building a custom roblox workspace esp, you'll likely run a loop (usually tied to RunService.RenderStepped) that takes the position of a part, converts it using this function, and then moves a Frame or a TextLabel to those coordinates. It's a bit of a headache to get the scaling right so that labels don't look massive when objects are far away, but that's where the fun of tweaking variables comes in.
Why local scripts are key
You might be wondering if you should run this on the server or the client. The answer is always the client. Since an ESP is purely visual and only meant for the person using it, it belongs in a LocalScript. Putting this kind of logic on the server would not only be impossible (since the server doesn't have a "camera" or a "screen" to draw on), but it would also lag the entire game for everyone else.
By keeping your roblox workspace esp logic on the client, you ensure that the visuals are smooth. You want the labels and boxes to update at the same frame rate as your game. If there's even a slight delay, the ESP elements will look like they are "ghosting" or trailing behind the actual objects as you move your camera around.
Keeping things optimized
One of the biggest mistakes people make when they start coding stuff for the workspace is forgetting about performance. If you have a script that is constantly searching through the entire workspace using GetDescendants() every single frame, your frame rate is going to tank. The workspace can have thousands of parts, and looking through all of them 60 times a second is just bad practice.
A better way to handle it is to use tags or specific folders. For example, if you only want to track players, you should just iterate through game.Players:GetPlayers() and find their characters in the workspace. If you're looking for items, maybe put them in a specific folder when the game starts.
Another pro tip: use CollectionService. You can tag certain objects with a string like "ObjectiveItem" and then use GetTagged to quickly find them. You can also use GetInstanceAddedSignal to detect exactly when a new tagged object enters the workspace, so you don't have to keep checking for new items constantly. This keeps your script lean and your game running smoothly.
Playing it safe and fair
We have to talk about the elephant in the room. Most people looking for a roblox workspace esp are doing so because they want an advantage in a game. While it's a great way to learn about the engine's rendering pipeline and Luau scripting, using these tools in games you don't own can get you banned pretty quickly. Roblox's anti-cheat systems are always evolving, and they definitely look for common ESP patterns.
The best way to use this knowledge is for your own development projects. Imagine you're building a complex round-based game and you need a way to debug where NPCs are spawning or where the "win zone" is located. A custom ESP tool is incredibly helpful for developers to visualize invisible logic markers during testing. It's a legitimate development technique that just happens to be shared by the "exploiting" community.
Wrapping it up
Building a roblox workspace esp is a great project if you want to understand how 3D space translates to a 2D screen. Whether you're using the modern Highlight instance for a quick fix or diving into WorldToViewportPoint for a custom UI-based tracker, you're going to learn a lot about how the engine handles data.
Just remember to keep your code clean, avoid heavy loops that crawl through the whole workspace unnecessarily, and always test your performance. It's easy to make something that works, but it takes a bit more effort to make something that works well without making your GPU scream. Anyway, have fun with it—tinkering with the workspace is easily one of the best ways to level up your scripting skills.