Happy New Years, people!

I’ve been taking it easy the last week and a half, chillaxing in Rehoboth Beach, DE. You might not think that that would be a good place to be in the middle of winter, but you would be wrong, it was great. Luckily for you guys, while I was admiring nature, eating delicious pastries, and catching up on my Peter Molyneux games (also known as “doing research”), Builderman was slaving away in the pixel mines. So we may see a new release this week. Unless there’s a cave-in.

Continue reading

Those of you who were online this Thursday evening and Friday morning had a sneak peak of our ROBLOX badges feature. We have had heavy traffic this Friday morning. Coupled with the new statistics and badges pages, our database machine started pegging at 100% and http://www.roblox.com/ went to a slow crawl.  We are fixing right now and have taken the badges pages offline. In the interim, all statistics that go towards badges are still being gathered.

For those of you who are curious about badges (and missed the unintentional sneak preview), I’ll repeat the descriptions of the first round of badges here.  Kudos to Matt and Erik for getting this cranking.

Continue reading

When I was in school, my teachers would sometimes comment that I had a warped sense of humor. Anyone who has played the new Christmas level will probably agree. I won’t even tell you what I had planned for the Thanksgiving level before it became obvious there would be no time to work on it. Ok, one small hint. It was going to be set in Roanoke.

But that is not what I want to talk about today. Today I want to talk about the new Christmas level. When I started to design the level, I was interested in creating a new Roblox game type that did not directly center around combat. I also wanted to try to make a level where time bombs were useful and dying meant something. Finally I wanted to make a team game. Santa’s Winter Stronghold was the result and I do not think that I was entirely successful — it is a pretty looking map though.

Continue reading

I write the physics code in ROBLOX and have just finished a major re-write to add articulated characters.  The new engine is fast, simple and easier to maintain (we hope!).  When I look at what I threw out, I see lots of code that was prematurely optimized.

Some background on the ROBLOX physics engine. It’s designed to handle colliding bodies and joints in roughly order-N time.  This means that 1000 colliding bodies should only be twice as slow as 500 colliding bodies. The engine is constantly evolving and has not been highly optimized.  For example, there are many areas of the ROBLOX engine that would lend themselves to SIMD code (doing four numeric operations in parallel). This has not been done yet.  The engine has been designed to work on n-core processing architectures, but once again we have not made this optimization. We’re looking forward to getting our hands on a quad-core box to see if our physics really runs 4x faster!

Continue reading

Sometime over the weekend we reached a milestone: our 10,000th Roblox user account was registered by “destroyman”. I haven’t seen him online yet, so maybe he is just sitting on it until he can flip it for a profit on eBay. We would love to be able to award our 10,000th user some sort of prize, but we don’t have anything to give at the moment. Maybe the 20,000th user will be more fortunate.

stcsean47 writes:

Continue reading

In the beginning there was an empty darkness.. The only thing in this void was a black brick, Two-By-Two. Two-By-Two was the Alpha Brick, the First. Copied, pasted, and recolored a million times, Robloxia was built out of nothing from the images of Two-By-Two. These were the early days…

The Chronicles of Roblox, VI.203

Continue reading