Your Creation Could Be Featured at the Virtual BLOXcon on 9/21

By Andrew Haak - August 23, 2013

As you probably know by now, we’re hosting a Virtual BLOXcon less than one month from today. Roughly 0.1% of ROBLOX’s population could actually attend one of this summer’s in-person BLOXcons, so this online event will give everyone a chance to experience some of the magic. The following is a tentative overview of what the Virtual BLOXcon will offer — including some of your creations.

Live streaming video from ROBLOX HQ. We’ll do live Q&A sessions, give away additional awards, talk about new ROBLOX product development, stream gameplay, and more. Think of it like the Main Stage Presentation we held at each BLOXcon, but a little more laid back and broken into separate segments.

Outlines: Simple Appearance, Complex Technology

By Simon Kozlov - August 22, 2013

Last month, ROBLOX launched a new rendering feature known as “outlines.” Outlines essentially draw a black border around all the edges you see in ROBLOX worlds; helping to establish a more unified aesthetic between the vast array of creations. While they’re a work in progress and we’ve since decided to make them optional, the way we arrived at their implementation was a challenging process of considering the industry standards and developing our own solution. We ultimately settled on a technique that fits squarely within the confines of our platform and is entirely scalable to a wide range of legacy hardware.

The Extrusion Method

With the extrusion method, developers first create an extruded (slightly bigger) version of the 3D object, render it black, and place the original object on top–the resulting image creates the illusion of a black and bold frame encompassing the 3D object. This is an expensive process computationally–in order to pursue this method, we’d have to render everything twice (the object and the outline frame), which would lead to a larger pool of users with older hardware who simply couldn’t experience ROBLOX. So we took a look at…

Binary File Format Cuts Studio Load, Save and Upload Times

By Arseny Kapoulkine - August 21, 2013

Three months back, we announced our transition toward a binary file format and explained how the technology has achieved a 100x reduction in the file size of ROBLOX places and a 5-10x reduction in load/save time. We have been rolling out the new format transparently and carefully, starting with the temporary files created for “Play Solo” and “Start Server” sessions in ROBLOX Studio. This week, we finished applying the format to all of ROBLOX, including Personal Build Server saves, and local place saves, loads and uploads via ROBLOX Studio.

You can look back at our original tech article about the binary file format to understand how re-arranging data makes it work and see the results of a couple tests we ran to prove its efficacy. If you’re the anecdotal type, however, you can simply experience it for yourself by loading and saving places in ROBLOX Studio, looking at the reduction in local file sizes, and uploading content to ROBLOX.com. In general, you should notice that files are smaller and saving/loading/uploading is faster – especially when you’re working with a place built out of tens of thousands of parts.

Feedback Loop: Sounds & Music, Group Ranks, Badges and More

By John Shedletsky - August 20, 2013

99% of the content available on ROBLOX is created by our passionate community of builders. In Feedback Loop – the spiritual successor to the long-running Responding to User Feedback series – we respond to builders’ grand ideas for ROBLOX and questions about the past, present and future.

In this issue, John Shedletsky discusses the potential for user-created faces, sounds and music, removing group ranks, game analytics, rendering motion blur, a “badge showcase” section on the profile, building performance questions, and more. All of the feedback featured in this article was collected via a Twitter survey. Follow @ROBLOX for opportunities to submit your feedback in the future!

Building ROBLOX Battle, Part 3: Metrics and the Big Picture

By Sorcus - August 19, 2013

Our Games Team has been spending significant time making ROBLOX Battle as robust and feature-rich as it can be. We’ve already covered some of the more interesting updates, including the core gameplay mechanics that have been introduced recently and level design. Today, we had the chance to chat with Sorcus, the Games Team Lead, about using metrics to inform and gauge infrastructural changes made to ROBLOX Battle. Oh, and ROBLOX Battle is now open source. Read on for more.

Making the decision to completely overhaul ROBLOX Battle was challenging–as the Lead of the Games Team, I’m tasked with thinking about the big picture. Whereas Dan worked on gameplay specifically, and Luke was tasked with designing levels, my job was overseeing every single update to ROBLOX Battle. Early on during talks about revamping our flagship title, one thing became abundantly clear to me: if we’re going to do this, we want metrics.

Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: August 18th, 2013

By Andrew Haak - August 18, 2013

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: BLOXcon New York City media and awards, the upcoming Virtual BLOXcon, complete control over outlines, two game designers talk about creating dynamic obstacle courses, what’s working for Paid Access, a goodbye to our summer interns, a guided tour of New Hellenic Republic: City of Naxos, a pile of videos and art, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Two-week Blog Recap

We skipped last Sunday’s Weekly Roundup in light of BLOXcon New York City. Now that it’s done, we should be back on an actual weekly schedule! Here’s what’s gone on in the last couple weeks.

BLOXcon Hackathon Winners Share Tips and Experiences

By Alan Fackler - August 17, 2013

Now that all three BLOXcons have wrapped (and we’re hard at work creating our Virtual BLOXcon for September, in case you were wondering), we thought we’d take some time to talk with two top Hackathon performers (NickPatella and Ethancomputermad) to seek out tips for future participants. Their insight can help you get a better understanding of the type of skills it takes to win such a difficult and competitive building and scripting challenge.

To clarify, the ROBLOX Hackathon is a series of building and scripting challenges, where each participant is given something to create, and a time frame to create it. The builder must complete their creation (whether that’s a gun with a reloadable clip, a pig that oinks, or a bubble machine) before time runs out, or get as far along as possible. By the end, our panel of ROBLOX engineers scores each creation based on ingenuity, beauty, and functionality. There are a lot of types of contests we could run at BLOXcon, but the Hackathon blends many of our fundamental ideals, including the spirit and passion of creation and the rush of friendly competition.