Responding to User Feedback, V7

Ever since we made the request for your ROBLOX “Top Three,” we’ve been combing through the feedback and responding to your most insightful comments and pertinent questions. This week, John Shedletsky, ROBLOX’s Creative Director and Content Lead, elaborates on a variety of topics, including our new LEGO Hero Factory Level, news on our studio mode, dynamic lighting, and more.

Rogeke15: New ROBLOX character joints ^_^

For the LEGO Hero Factory level, which you’ll be able to try out this upcoming Monday, we created a ROBLOX character with no fewer than 14 joints using the existing ROBLOX animation system. It would be interesting to polish up our animation tools and ship them as a standard part of ROBLOX Studio – this would allow place creators the option of swapping out the default ROBLOX character with a more articulated one.

Unmaskd_RBL: ROBLOX should let players go into studio mode when people are playing in their games.

The ROBLOX content team (the super cool guys who build out official ROBLOX levels) is acutely aware that there are bugs that crop up in Lua scripts that you can only effectively debug in a multiplayer instance of the game. We think it would be very helpful to allow the creator of a level to be able to attach to a running instance of the game through ROBLOX Studio. The only technical hitch is allowing this capability to place owners, but not to potential exploiters. We think we have a good idea for how to accomplish this.

So are we! Our current graphics feature push revolves around allowing users to have 200-700k parts in their levels with zero lag (we may have some early demos of this to show off here on the blog in the next several weeks). After we complete that, we plan to move onto materials and lighting.

Ryan123777: CFrame plugin built into ROBLOX Studio.

When people ask for CFraming tools to be built into Studio, I think they are asking for several different capabilities. First, they want to be able to drag/rotate/translate parts precisely. Second, they want to be able to position parts inside of each other without regard for collision geometry. Third, they probably want a way to weld these parts together so that it is not necessary to anchor them. This preserves the capability for them to be destroyed via explosions or to be used in mobile platforms (like vehicles). All these capabilities will come to Studio in the relatively near future.

NonstopEpicRBLX: Better uploading quality when it comes to decals.

I chatted with this user a bit more over twitter – the basic idea is that he is retexturing hats and needs more resolution. He’s also using decals (presumably large ones) to texture blocks in-game. ROBLOX internally downsizes large images that users upload to 256 x 256 pixels. We do this now for two reasons: to conserve bandwidth (so assets load quickly) and also so that players on low-end graphics hardware don’t exhaust their texture memory. For some tasks, like creating custom skyboxes or GUI images, 256 x 256 is not enough resolution. At some point we will address this with the option to upload at custom resolution when necessary, but it’s not something that we are working on at the moment.

Cowbear16: Built-in admin commands so that a game’s owner can ban/kick other users easily.

You are going to be psyched – the content team is building something like this right now. We’re going to make it an optional add-in to any place you build using ROBLOX Studio. The exact mechanism is still to be determined, but we think that god powers will be very popular with our place builders.

Wildphillie: Sword fight tournament. You choose users for a 5v5 death match (Anti teamkill).

We’ve been talking for a while about a similar idea. Basically we would allow groups to play versus each other in specific games and possibly earn prizes for winning. For instance, your group challenges another group to a game of ROBLOX Base Wars. Each group pays 100 tickets (or some custom amount) to launch the challenge. The winning group gets all the tickets added to their treasury. From here they can use it to buy equipment, bling out their group page, launch new group challenges, or possibly even pay out members. All the details are obviously to be decided, but I think the general idea is a good one. 

Koopapara: You could do a app kinda thing, where you could change what things you get in your settings.

This is a great idea. For the past 6 months, I’ve been trying to make the My ROBLOX page the place to go on ROBLOX.com if you want to see everything that has happened since you last visited the site. Right now there is no really great way to find out if any of your favorite places have been updated by the creator, or if there are new items on sale that you might want to purchase, or to locate games that a large number of your friends are playing. In the future all this information will be much more readily available – possibly through an interface similar to what you have proposed.