Last weekend, ROBLOX reached a milestone: 100,000 concurrent users. This achievement inspired us to do some research about where this figure stands in the greater scheme of gaming and online entertainment.

Before getting to the facts, note that “100,000 concurrent players” means 100,000 authenticated ROBLOX users were playing games, building in ROBLOX Studio and browsing Roblox.com at the same time. It does not include every visitor at Roblox.com – that would make it a much larger number – nor does it represent guests (players who are not logged into a ROBLOX account). We estimate there were 20,000 guests playing at the time.

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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: we talk with Uuvinu, the creator of ROBLOXRanks.com, we respond to your ideas for ROBLOX, several developers talk about the games they’re playing, the latest entry in our series about the ongoing development of ROBLOX for iPad, ROBLOX FPS Authority, ROBLOX on Google+ and more.

Seven-day Blog Recap

Spotlight on Uuvinu, the creator of ROBLOXRanks.com

User Uuvinu put together a website that ranks users based on a variety of different factors. It’s a very interesting service that’s getting thousands of hits a month. He’s also the creator of The Vortex, a ROBLOX game that emulates Portal pretty realistically. We chatted with him about his work and summarized our conversation in this, the latest Spotlight article.

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If the first part of developing a well-performing ROBLOX experience for the iPad is ensuring stability through memory optimization, the second part is improving the frame rate to the point it’s as smooth as it is on a modern desktop or laptop computer. The process is a balancing act: push performance optimization to its limit without noticeably degrading the quality of the experience.

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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: Halloween at ROBLOX HQ, games that keep players coming back (and the techniques they use), an update on ROBLOX for iPad development, and everything you need to know about Raycasting — including how Paintball! creator daxter33 uses it.

Halloween at ROBLOX: costumes and games

While ROBLOX users dressed their characters with the Halloween-themed attire and gear released throughout October, ROBLOX developers got into the spirit, too, and we have photos to prove it. On top of that, we reported four useful tips from members of the Content Team as to how to “Halloween-ify” your ROBLOX games. Sure, Halloween has come and gone, but many of the techniques described, such as zombies and atmospheric lighting, are good all year long. Check out the blog post for the gritty details.

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One of the most important parts of developing a high-quality ROBLOX experience for the iPad is ensuring smooth, stable, steady game-play performance. iPads are not as powerful as almost any modern-day desktop computer or laptop, which means our developers have to dig deep into ROBLOX’s code, uncover problem areas and tune them to run more efficiently, while keeping game-play quality in mind. The end goal is to have quality and performance exist in harmony; the challenge is pushing performance optimization to its limit without noticeably degrading the experience.

For the past month, the Client Team has been neck-deep in ROBLOX’s source code, identifying inefficiencies and re-engineering them in exchange for quantifiable and positive impacts on performance. One of the best benchmarks for illustrating their collective progress is Crossroads, a classic level the team has been using as an iPad testing ground since September. When we first launched the ROBLOX code stack on an iPad, Crossroads with eight players ran at an unplayable five frames per second (FPS). Today, it runs at a cool 30+ FPS.

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Given today is one of the few days it’s widely acceptable to do — and be — something out of the ordinary, we thought we’d take a break from what we’re working on and show you what we dressed up as for Halloween. Plus, now that we’ve spent a few weeks creating and releasing Halloween-themed gear, we have some last-minute recommendations from the ROBLOX Catalog.

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: see popular ROBLOX games running on an iPad, a deep dive on our fixes for character-motion stuttering, talking larger-than-life ROBLOX experiences with user Diddleshot, new game templates and more.

Popular games running on an iPad (and a wall of sticky notes)

As we continue to develop ROBLOX for iPad, one of the things we’re doing is helping ROBLOX users optimize their games for play on a tablet. We produced a short video showing a sneak peek of our development effort and some of said games actually running on an iPad. Check it out in the blog post. We’ll have more information about our development progress in the coming weeks.

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