Every week, we’re busy telling the stories behind our platform, our technology, and our place in the gaming and technology industries. For those of you who catch up with ROBLOX over the weekend, the Weekly ROBLOX Roundup collects the best stuff to hit our various avenues of publication in the last week. This time: graphics rendering, the first ROBLOX Hackathon, new groups features and more.
A vision for visuals
At ROBLOX Game Conference 2012, ROBLOX developer Simon Kozlov presented five prototype videos that demonstrate a potential, future look for ROBLOX. While there’s no projected release date — the prototypes weren’t actually built in our game engine — we’re excited to see your generally positive feedback and excitement for a day when ROBLOX’s graphical representation gets a refresh. Make sure to check out all five prototypes and let us know what you think. Here’s the first:
Who won the first ROBLOX Hackathon?
That would be user aperson1890. You can find out how the rest of the participants fared in our post dedicated to the Hackathon. If you’re really into it, you can download our entire collection of Hackathon challenges, including 14 building and 14 scripting tasks.
The future of groups on ROBLOX
At RGC 2012, Software Engineer Navin Lal premiered some of our ideas for more functional, flexible and competitive groups on ROBLOX. We relayed his ideas, including in-game group representation, group battles and land ownership, group websites and group game-building collaboration, in this blog post. It’s a solid insight into some of the massively multiplayer and social integration we’d like to bring to ROBLOX.
The deadliest swords on ROBLOX
This week was chock full of RGC 2012 coverage. As a little reprieve, we posted an overview of the most powerful swords you can acquire from the ROBLOX Catalog. If you manage to collect them all, you’ll have a serious arsenal of cutlery.
Don’t forget to check out our photo gallery from RGC 2012. We even included a short video spanning events throughout the day and conference floor. If you couldn’t be there, you’ll at least get a feel for the day’s many goings on.
A follow-up to our article about procedurally generated contentIf you’re a ROBLOX game developer and you were interested in the story we ran about procedurally generated content in “Zombie City!”, you might want to check out this in-depth Gamasutra feature on the strengths and weaknesses of procedural generation. Of note is the idea that procedural generation — creating content algorithmically – often works best in conjunction with manual content creation. So, if you use a plugin to automatically generate city buildings, it might be worth your time to manually plot out other environmental objects. Something worth considering when you work with terrain and other automatic content creation. |
Last week, we asked our Twitter followers what ROBLOX game is, at the moment, the most interesting. We saw many mentions of Apocalypse Rising, an eerie survival game, and crazyman32′s AeroCity Tycoon, a sim-style game that lets you go from mining coal to building airplanes. We’re looking for input on games we can cover, so let us know what current ROBLOX games you find interesting.