Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: December 23, 2012

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: ROBLOX Mobile games now available to all users, featherweight parts open up a world of building possibilities, we look at the games proving popular on mobile, GUI design and best practices, gifts, Medieval Warfare, and other bits and pieces.

Seven-day Blog Recap

Mobile gaming now available to everyone

iPad showing Games pageLast week we decided to open all games to all users on ROBLOX Mobile, partly because the app is performing well and partly because of your passionate feedback. Now, whether you’re a Builders Club member or not, you can log into ROBLOX Mobile and play all of our millions of games. Check out this blog post on the big change for more information about ROBLOX Mobile and how you can get it on your iOS device!

Featherweight parts are here

FeatherDevelopment of ROBLOX for mobile devices required that we optimize our performance and memory usage. One of the keys to getting existing ROBLOX levels with high part counts to run on hardware-constrained mobile devices was featherweight parts, an ambitious technology that also benefits desktop users and allows a substantially higher number of parts per place. We recently enabled the feature and you should be seeing performance improvements today. To learn how it works and how to leverage it in building, read through our detailed featherweight parts post.

We’re excited about the possibilities this brings to our community and can’t wait to see some grand works of building.

What games are popular so far on ROBLOX Mobile?

We’ve been keeping an eye on ROBLOX Mobile to see what games users are gravitating toward when playing on the go. In this article, we call out a few games that have been popular in the app’s early days and try to determine what makes them particularly mobile-friendly.

Gifts, gifts and more gifts

2012 Gifts‘Tis the season. Here are the posts.

GUI design: Z-indices and best practices

A recent performance optimization changed the way ROBLOX renders user-created graphic user interfaces (GUIs). To give you full control of your GUI design in light of the updated rendering method, we’ve introduced Z-indices, which function like layers. Game Engineer Ben Tkacheff and Content Team Lead Deepak Chandrasekaran (Sorcus) explain how to use the Z-index in our latest blog post. They also offer some general tips and best practices to help new and longtime GUI designers do great interface work.

You should play this ROBLOX game

In what may be a first for the “You should…” segment of the Weekly Roundup, this week I have a fantasy-themed game for you: Medieval Warfare by Schematics. At first glance, this seems like a typical MMO battlefield, but the game goes deeper than sword-fighting. Players organize into factions and not only support themselves and their teams by mining and harvesting resources, but also invade one another’s territory to disrupt their enemies’ efforts. With fantastic bases that match the respective faction’s uniforms and a vibrant terrain-based environment, the world is a fun place to be and the non-stop action is especially satisfying when your team is working together.

Medieval Warfare screenshot

Bits

Enjoy the holidays and be safe!