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: our custom-built binary file format, the BLOXcon poster contest, level design expertise from MahPizzaIsHere, an inspiring story (and video) from our “mini-BLOXcon” at Maker Faire, the Memorial Day Sale, a roundup of recent ROBLOX press, Ye Olde’ Village by ClonedFett35, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Seven-day Blog Recap

Our custom-built binary file format

As our developers release new features that expand the limits of the ROBLOX engine, new problems occasionally surface. For instance, we’ve made it much easier for builders to create huge ROBLOX places with tens of thousands of parts, but the amount of data in such worlds tends to result in unwieldy file sizes. We tackled that problem head-first by not just improving the way we store ROBLOX place data, but completely rewriting our file format for efficient storage. Arseny devised brilliant methods to make our custom file format super efficient, and the benefits stand to make the entire ROBLOX experience better — in an intentionally subtle way. It’s a dense article, but, if nothing else, a good insight into the problems our developers encounter and solve every day.

Calling the graphic designers of ROBLOXia!

We’re already running a contest to collect submissions for the ROBLOX International Film Festival, but we thought it only fair to give the graphic designers of ROBLOXia an equal opportunity to make their mark on our upcoming BLOXcon events. We’ve launched a poster contest, where you have a chance to design a BLOXcon poster and win fantastic prizes! The contest is now open for submissions and will remain open through June 2nd at 11:59 p.m. PT. Design and submit a BLOXcon poster for BLOXcon Chicago, BLOXcon London or BLOXcon New York City today!

Note: the original blog post contains templates that you can use with common graphic design software. Use them to get started on the right foot!

Level design with MahPizzaIsHere

While many builders take advantage of our creation-oriented community to acquire levels for their games, MahPizzaIsHere makes the case that level design should receive just as much attention as the game’s code. In this, the second in our series of Developers’ Journals penned by actual ROBLOX builders, he offers tips and techniques for building good-looking, but high-performance levels, particularly in the context of competitive first-person shooters. If you’re a game developer or aspiring level designer, the details he shares are undoubtedly worth leveraging.

An inspiring story from our Maker Faire booth

Plenty of interesting stuff happened in the ROBLOX booth at Maker Faire Bay Area 2013, but one of the most memorable stories was that of aperson1890, who actually built the booth from within the booth. He spent almost all of the weekend with us and demonstrated some serious building and scripting prowess. I visited with him at the event and checked in again via Skype a couple days later. This is the story that resulted.

Make your way to the end for a short video of the things we saw in and around the ROBLOX booth!

The Memorial Day Sale is live!

Our Memorial Day Sale started on Friday and we’re now in the thick of it. Check out our original preview for some of the details about what the sale entails, or just head straight to the ROBLOX catalog to start shopping.

ROBLOX, Elsewhere on the Web

ROBLOX has been the subject of some interesting articles across the web in the last couple weeks. Here are some cool perspectives to check out:

Gamasutra is hosting a postmortem about the development and launch of ROBLOX Mobile, our iOS app that officially launched late in 2012. It’s long, but a nice, comprehensive look at the creation of our mobile product.
Gamezebo recently published a positive article about our dynamic lighting technology. You can check out their thoughts here.
Our Maker Faire booth got a bit of attention from both Examiner.com and the San Mateo Daily Journal, and MaximumPC.

You should see this ROBLOX place

Ye Olde’ Village is a work in progress by ClonedFett35 that’s already showing a great spark of life. The large cathedral, forgery and horse transportation lend it a believable medieval atmosphere, while the tasteful use of flames and dynamic lighting give it a warmness that makes you want to stick around. The entire place reminds me of one of the quaint towns you might stroll through in Oblivion. I’m looking forward to see what else ClonedFett35 adds to his growing world.

Bits

Check out this video demo by crazyman32 of a “sound reference” plugin that lists many ROBLOX sounds in one place.
Do you subscribe to the ROBLOX YouTube channel? Our own Maxxz produces video reviews of games and places, and we usually post at least one per week. It’s a great way to see some of the best our platform has to offer. The most recent review covers the long-popular Flood Escape.
For those of you who are celebrating it, have a great Memorial Day tomorrow.