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: dynamic lighting illuminates ROBLOX Mobile, player engagement at popular games, paid game access beta, TheGamer101‘s random map generation script, a BLOXcon update and teaser, a Spotlight on a ROBLOXian truck aficionado, Notre-Dame De Paris and Broken Bones, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Seven-day Blog Recap

Dynamic lighting in the palms of your hands

As promised, we recently delivered dynamic lighting to ROBLOX Mobile. In this story, we take a behind-the-scenes look at all the technical hurdles — from shading to CPU architecture — our Rendering Team had to overcome to make the beloved feature work well on hardware-constrained mobile devices. To all you mobile ROBLOX players, enjoy having the power of dynamic lighting in the palms of your hands!

Player engagement and the value of a strong core

If there’s one thing most ROBLOX game developers and builders can probably agree on, it’s that having an active core of players is a good thing. In this article, we look at how well several popular ROBLOX games engage players, and compare how “sticky” they are. (“Sticky,” for the purpose of this article, is the percentage of players who returned for at least five play sessions in the previous 30 days.) We provide valuable insight into the vast number of players on popular games, and draw some conclusions about what keeps players coming back. If game/player statistics are your kind of thing, check out the complete article.

While we’re working toward providing statistics to our game developers, TheGamer101 gave me a tip: this model keeps track of the average play time of everyone who has played in a certain server. It might provide some insight into how people play your game.

Paid access

Paid access is an experimental feature in beta that allows ROBLOX game developers and builders to require that players pay a standard fee in order to access the content. We launched the feature to our SiteTest3 test environment so you can experiment with it and provide feedback. As mentioned in the original announcement, this is in an early stage and we plan to consider your thoughts and suggestions for the official launch. Here are a couple things we’d like to clarify, based on the responses we’ve received thus far:

Currently, you cannot choose your own price (meaning no wildly high costs)
You cannot disable comments on a game selling paid access (so you can avoid being scammed)
It is entirely up to the game developer or builder to use this feature

TheGamer101 on random map generation

TheGamer101 is one of the most prolific builders and game developers on ROBLOX. We invited him to author an article of his own, and he decided to go in-depth on the script that automatically generates a random map at the beginning of each round of King of the Hill. It sounds simple, but a random map that also encourages fun gameplay is no small challenge. Read the article to learn how he went from a basic idea to a complex script. It might be something you can apply to your ambitious project.

Who’s going to be at what BLOXcon?

We’ve finalized our BLOXcon travel plans, meaning we’ve finally announced exactly what admins will be attending what BLOXcon. (We’d love to send everyone to every event, but we’ve got a company to run here!) To see the list and a quick teaser of BLOXcon Chicago — which, I might add, is just two weeks away — check out yesterday’s blog post.

Ah, what the heck. Here’s the Chicago teaser.

Spotlight on the 18-wheeling ManyFireman

We stumbled across ManyFireman and his Ro-Scania Trucking Simulator 2013 a short while back, and were impressed with the quality of his 18-wheeler construction. Considering he specializes in something so specific and unique, we decided to make him our latest Spotlight candidate. In addition to finding out what inspired him to get into trucking simulation, we have a new prototype video that demos much-improved vehicle physics and some other upcoming improvements. Find out what ManyFireman thought of the demo in the full feature!

You should play this ROBLOX game

Notre-Dame De Paris is a place by Darkbane132 that, according to its title, is not going to be finished. And that’s a shame, considering how far he had come and how completely epic it looks at this stage of the buildout. While it might never be 100%, it’s still worth seeing. ROBLOX builders do amazing things.

Broken Bones (Figure Physics)

I’m not about to tell you Broken Bones is a practical or particularly wise use of your time, but it’s the summer and, in times like these, there’s nothing wrong with a little silly fun. In Broken Bones, the object is to hurdle yourself through a dangerous environment and break as many bones as possible. Pro-tip: to get started, locate the blue “Stair Fall” button on the main interface. Start falling to earn cash and unlock new levels/abilities.

Bits

The printed BLOXcon posters have arrived at ROBLOX HQ, and they look great!
Here’s a cool timelapse video of crazyman32 creating the minimap for his F1 racing demo.
Thanks to everyone who responded to our blog reader survey. We’ve started reading through the thousands of responses and will award 10 respondents with 1,000 Robux sometime this week. We’ll also have a brief summary of the results in next Sunday’s Weekly Roundup.
This week, we posted a review of a ROBLOX classic: Base Wars: The Land. Find out what makes this game such a hit among our community of gamers.