If you've been messing around with Luau lately, you've probably realized that a roblox esp distance script is one of those projects that looks really impressive but is actually pretty grounded in basic math. Whether you're trying to build a custom UI for your own game or you're just curious about how players track each other across a massive map, understanding the "Extra Sensory Perception" (ESP) logic combined with distance tracking is a great way to level up your scripting skills.
The cool thing about adding a distance tracker to an ESP is that it provides actual context. Knowing someone is behind a wall is one thing, but knowing they're exactly 150 studs away changes how a player reacts. It's a classic feature in many competitive games, and implementing it in Roblox is surprisingly straightforward once you get the hang of how the engine handles 3D space and UI rendering.
Why add distance to your ESP?
When you're just starting out, a basic ESP might just be a box around a character or a name tag that stays visible through walls. But that's a bit bare-bones, isn't it? Adding a distance readout makes the whole thing feel more professional. From a developer's perspective, it teaches you how to use Magnitude, which is basically the bread and butter of distance calculation in 3D environments.
Think about it: in a huge open-world game, you don't necessarily want to see every single player's tag if they're a mile away. By calculating distance, you can even set up "culling" logic where the ESP only shows up if the player is within a certain range. It keeps the screen from getting cluttered with text and boxes that nobody can even read. Plus, it's just satisfying to see those numbers tick up and down as you move around the map.
Getting the basic setup ready
Before you even touch the code, you have to think about how you're going to display this information. Usually, the best way to do this is with a BillboardGui. If you haven't used those before, they're basically 2D UI elements that exist in 3D space. They "point" at the camera no matter where you move, which is exactly what we need for a name or distance tag.
Inside that BillboardGui, you'll usually want a TextLabel. This is where the magic happens. You'll be updating the text of that label constantly—probably every frame—to reflect the current distance between your character and the target. It's simple, effective, and doesn't require any complex math beyond a single vector calculation.
Coding the distance logic
Now, for the actual heart of the roblox esp distance script. You'll want to be working inside a LocalScript because ESP is something that should only happen on the client side. You don't want the server trying to calculate distances for every single player and sending that data back; that's a one-way ticket to Lag City.
The core of the logic relies on (PositionA - PositionB).Magnitude. In Roblox, if you subtract one Vector3 from another, you get a new vector that represents the gap between them. When you call .Magnitude on that result, it gives you a single number: the distance in studs.
Here's a rough idea of how that looks in practice. You'd find the HumanoidRootPart of your own character and the HumanoidRootPart of the target. Subtract their positions, get the magnitude, and then round it off to the nearest whole number (because nobody needs to see 15 decimal places of distance). Once you have that number, you just concatenate it with a string like " studs" and shove it into your TextLabel.
Keeping things smooth and lag-free
One mistake a lot of people make when first writing a roblox esp distance script is running the update loop way too fast or in an inefficient way. If you have 50 players on a server and you're running a while true do loop with no delay for every single one of them, your frame rate is going to tank.
A better way to handle this is by using RunService.RenderStepped or RunService.Heartbeat. These events fire every time the game renders a frame. However, even that might be overkill if you're worried about performance. You could easily update the distance text every 0.1 seconds using a simple loop and the game would still feel perfectly responsive.
Another trick is to use a "For" loop to iterate through all the players in the game, check if they have a character, and then update their specific BillboardGui. This keeps everything contained in one manageable spot rather than having fifty separate scripts running all at once. It's much cleaner and easier to debug if something goes wrong.
Handling the UI visibility
One of the trickiest parts of a good roblox esp distance script isn't actually the math—it's making sure the UI doesn't look like a mess. Since BillboardGuis have a property called AlwaysOnTop, they'll show up through walls. That's the "ESP" part of the equation.
But you also have to consider the scale. If a player is 500 studs away, you don't want their name tag to be the same size as someone standing right in front of you. You can play around with the Size and StudsOffset properties to make sure the labels stay readable without being overwhelming. Some people like to make the text get smaller the further away the player is, which adds a nice sense of depth to the whole thing.
A note on safety and fair play
We should probably talk about the elephant in the room. While making a roblox esp distance script is a fantastic way to learn Luau and understand how game engines work, you have to be careful about how you use it. If you're using scripts like this to gain an unfair advantage in a game you didn't create, you're looking at a quick ban from the Roblox moderation team.
Roblox has been stepping up its anti-cheat game (Byfron/Hyperion), and injecting code to see players through walls is a pretty easy way to get flagged. However, if you're building this for your own game—say, a team-based shooter where you want to see your teammates' locations and distances—then it's a perfectly legitimate and super helpful feature. It's all about the context. Always respect the Terms of Service and use your coding powers for good!
Troubleshooting common issues
If you're trying to get your script to work and nothing is showing up, there are a few usual suspects. First, check the Adornee property of your BillboardGui. It needs to be set to a part (like the Head or HumanoidRootPart) for it to actually follow the player around. If the Adornee is nil, the UI just sits at the origin of the map.
Second, make sure your script is actually finding the other players. Sometimes, characters don't load in instantly, so you might need to use WaitForChild() or check if the character exists before trying to calculate the distance. If your script tries to find the position of a player who hasn't spawned yet, it'll throw an error and stop running entirely.
Lastly, check your math. If your distance is showing up as some weird, massive number, you might be accidentally calculating the distance from the map's center (0,0,0) instead of from your own character's position. It sounds silly, but it happens to the best of us when we're coding late at night.
Wrapping it up
At the end of the day, a roblox esp distance script is a great "intermediate" project. It takes you past the basics of just changing a part's color and into the realm of UI manipulation, vector math, and client-side optimization.
Once you get the distance labels working, you can start adding even more features. Maybe you want the text color to change from green to red as a player gets closer? Or maybe you want to add a health bar next to the distance? The sky's the limit once you have that foundation. Just keep experimenting, keep the code clean, and most importantly, keep having fun with it. That's what Roblox development is all about.