Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: September 9, 2012

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Weekly ROBLOX Roundup logoEvery 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: our encounter with a 1-in-4-billion .NET bug, the very different ways several ROBLOX employees broke into the gaming industry, great video trailer submissions, a deep look at ROBLOX’s user-advertising infrastructure and more.

An unlikely occurrence

In July, one ROBLOX user unknowingly caused a bug, with roughly one-in-four-billion chances of occurring, that broke every Roblox.com page on which his character thumbnail appeared. All this, because he put a t-shirt on his character. If you want to know how a t-shirt cascaded into a site-wide bug (or if you have a penchant for numbers, odds, gambling and the like), you should read our blog post – it’s a fascinating view of our basic data structure and the volume of information we store.

So, you want to work at ROBLOX?

ROBLOX office - group shot… Or in the gaming industry in general? There are a lot of things you can do today to prepare yourself. This week, we interviewed several ROBLOX developers to find out how they got to where they are today. The story covers choosing the right path in education, tinkering with development projects in your spare time, realizing dreams can become reality and more. Check it out here. I’m almost certain you’ll come out feeling at least some inspiration.

Mac OS X 10.5 LeopardImportant news for Mac OS X 10.5 users

As we work toward releasing ROBLOX as an iPad application, we’ve found that the software we use to compile our code works for either Mac OS X 10.5 or mobile devices — but not both. We have opted to discontinue support for ROBLOX on OS X 10.5. You can read why we made that decision and how you can update to a newer version of OS X in this blog post.

The infrastructure behind ROBLOX’s user-advertisements system

To put it simply, ROBLOX’s user-advertising system is complex and really cool. For the first time, we went in-depth on how it uses your ticket bid to place your ad on any Roblox.com page. Check out the blog post for all the nitty, gritty detals.

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