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: streaming join technology and testing, the games that made bank over Summer 2013, new Virtual BLOXcon information, the start of our foray into groups, two classic first-person shooters done ROBLOX style, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Seven-day blog recap

Let large levels faster and on more devices with streaming parts

ROBLOX’s Client Networking Team has tasked itself with an ambitious three-pronged goal: decrease join times into games, allow builders to make more complex places and creations, and offer support for all types of legacy hardware and mobile devices. We are taking a big step forward toward all three goals with a new technology we unveiled last week known as streaming parts. In the most basic sense, this technology allows you to play games while they load and play larger games on limited hardware (e.g., mobile devices) by streaming parts in and out around your character. You can learn more about the technology and, if you’re an existing developer, how you can help us test it by reading Wednesday’s full article.

The games that made money over summer, 2013 (and how they did it)

It’s always interesting to dig into the ROBLOX economy — this time, we looked at the games that made the best use of our monetization features (Game Passes, Affiliate Gear sales, and Paid Access) to find success over the summer. You’re going to have to visit the article to see the top 25 money-makers between from May to September, but I will say there’s a diverse blend of games, many of which employ a unique approach to selling players on their content. We also explore trends in Game Passes and Affiliate Gear to see what’s effective right now.

Virtual BLOXcon: a mere six days away

Virtual BLOXcon is next weekend! The online event you’ve all been waiting for will give everyone in the community a chance to experience our annual fan conventions via a livestream from ROBLOX HQ, recorded BLOXcon footage, and a lineup of great games. Many ROBLOX staffers will be online playing games and chatting with you throughout the event, so stay tuned to the blog for more details in the coming days. For the latest information, read yesterday’s post.

The first edition of “Group Dynamic”

Bubbling under the surface of ROBLOX is an interconnected network of groups: circles of ROBLOXians who share just about every sort of interest you can imagine. Because it’s a huge realm that’s bigger than we can capture in any single article, we’ve decided to kick off a series called “Group Dynamic” to give you a taste of the group scene and the interesting things that happen within it.

Sometimes, groups — especially of the military variety — get really competitive. In our first “Group Dynamic”, we experience what it’s like to be part of a military group. That means training, patrolling, defending and raiding rival military groups in heated competition that isn’t too far removed from the pro-gaming circuit.

See what the ROBLOX film-making scene has delivered this summer

The ROBLOX community features a core of great filmmakers, and we’d love to see them create more and more ROBLOX-themed videos. While we already held the BLOXY Awards to spark creation, we’d also like to continue the film-making community’s momentum by more regularly featuring their work right here. Check out Monday’s post for an inside look at what ROBLOX’s video experts have been doing as of late!

You should play this ROBLOX game

I hereby proclaim this the Week of Classic First-person Shooters Recreated in ROBLOX!

Last time I checked out Blood Gulch by CellDwellr, it was just a recreation of what is probably Halo’s most recognizable map. Since then, the developer has started to bring in the most important part of the original Halo: the gameplay. It’s not an exact match — and it shouldn’t be, considering Halo is ultimately a console FPS — but the jump has a Halo-like floatiness, the assault rifle feels responsive, and the pacing feels familiar. I would love to see CellDwellr enable the teleporters and build a great Warthog. With some fine tuning, he could capture the excitement of Halo’s addictive Capture the Flag mode.

I’ve spent a lot of time playing Counter-Strike in my day and, despite the hours I’ve poured into it, I’ve never been any good. (I’ll blame it on a lack of patience. I often went into odds-against situations guns a’blazing.) SilentSwords has managed to capture the intensity of Counter-Strike’s firefights, the tension of the team-based objectives, and the variability of the weapon store with CounterBlast. I know this ROBLOX rendition of a classic multiplayer FPS is at least moderately accurate because, well, I’m still not any good at it. It’s a work in progress, but give it a try!

Bits

This week, ROBLOX.com received a small, but much-requested and valuable update: a “Sent” tab for private messages. You can now look back at messages you’ve sent — if you’ve been a member for a while, chances are you’ve logged pages upon pages. Thank you, Web Team!
Crazyman32 has been working on a remote-controlled quadricopter, which he demonstrated early in the week with this YouTube video. Since then, the vehicle has gone live in his Freeflight game, and it’s quite a fun way to spy on/troll other players.
We held a test session for user-uploaded sounds this week. Did you get to try it out?