The Holiday Spirit Spreads Through ROBLOX

By Alan Fackler - December 24, 2012

As the seasons change, ROBLOX users have found many ways to slightly alter their places and games to reflect the spirit of the season. With Christmas just around the corner, some users have updated their places to spread holiday cheer, while others are making brand new games just in time for the holidays. Check them out!

The Complex V.4

User spyro372 re-decorated his popular place, which features a mall, stores, parks and a few fast food joints, for the holiday season. Wreaths decorate doors of houses, candy canes shoot out of the ground, and there’s a sleigh with a bunch of reindeer in front of the mall. Aesthetics aside, spyro372 did something tricky to the snow on the ground: if you sit on the slide (it’s in the center of the map) and slide down, once you hit the snow, you’ll just keep right on sliding, all the way across the map if you choose.

Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: December 23, 2012

By Andrew Haak - December 23, 2012

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: ROBLOX Mobile games now available to all users, featherweight parts open up a world of building possibilities, we look at the games proving popular on mobile, GUI design and best practices, gifts, Medieval Warfare, and other bits and pieces.

Seven-day Blog Recap

Mobile gaming now available to everyone

Last week we decided to open all games to all users on ROBLOX Mobile, partly because the app is performing well and partly because of your passionate feedback. Now, whether you’re a Builders Club member or not, you can log into ROBLOX Mobile and play all of our millions of games. Check out this blog post on the big change for more information about ROBLOX Mobile and how you can get it on your iOS device!

ROBLOX GUI Design: Z-index and Best Practices

By Andrew Haak - December 22, 2012

Part of our performance and memory optimization for ROBLOX Mobile was a transition from drawing graphic user interface (GUI) elements individually to in batches (read the details in this previous article). This change dramatically reduced the number of rendering commands sent from ROBLOX to your graphics chip, but in a small fraction of ROBLOX games it caused user-created menus to render in an undesired order. Today, Game Engineer Ben Tkacheff and Content Team Lead Deepak Chandrasekaran (Sorcus) help owners of existing games fix their menus, in the rare instance it’s necessary, and provide useful guidance and best practices for new GUI designers.

What changed?

In the past, we rendered user-created GUIs according to the hierarchy of individual elements in your ScreenGui object. It often worked out that the order you built each piece of your GUI was the same order ROBLOX rendered it, and your layers of buttons and text just fell into place.

Featherweight Parts: One Million Parts, One ROBLOX World

By Simon Kozlov - December 21, 2012

Featherweight parts, despite their name, have nothing to do with feathers, flying or anything bird-related. They do, however, have a lot to do with weight: while old ROBLOX parts are “heavy” memory users, featherweight parts are “super light,” allowing us to load and render more of them with the same computing power. The first iteration of featherweight parts has now released for ROBLOX on all platforms and it has already proven revolutionary in some ROBLOX places.

The following table shows the number of milliseconds required to render one frame. In a future release, these numbers will improve even further as we featherweight more materials, surfaces, and primitives.

Now Everyone Can Play Every Game on ROBLOX Mobile

By Dylan Bromley - December 20, 2012

ROBLOX Mobile has officially been available for a week. In the time since its launch, we’ve been closely monitoring the app to ensure a good user experience and listening to your feedback. Today, we’re pleased to announce all ROBLOX games are available to all users on ROBLOX Mobile. This should give you a great opportunity to enjoy ROBLOX — whether you’re a Builders Club member or not — during your travels and free time over the upcoming holiday break. You can log into ROBLOX Mobile now and play all of the millions of games you and your fellow users have created. Simply touch the “See More” button under All Games.

If you need game suggestions, check out our recent look at what games ROBLOX users are gravitating toward on mobile.

Give the Gift of Building with ROBLOX Game Cards

By Christina McGrath - December 19, 2012

Seeing a couple ROBLOX game cards peeking out the top of your holiday stocking is a great sight. It’s even better when you know the cards will get you a free virtual hat.

This month, we’re running a promotion on ROBLOX game cards from Walmart: redeem two $25 cards by the end of December and you’ll receive the Holiday Fedora. This hat is pretty rare – less than 200 users have received it at the time of this writing – so it could end up being a valuable commodity in the ROBLOX market. If you (or whoever is delivering your holiday gifts) are on the hunt for ROBLOX cards at Walmart, you’ll find them in the electronics section and special holiday displays at the front of each store.

What Games Are Users Playing on ROBLOX Mobile?

By Alan Fackler - December 18, 2012

ROBLOX Mobile has been available in the iTunes App Store for almost a week now, and we’ve been keeping a close eye on which games users gravitate towards. We’re interested for several reasons, the main one being that we want to know which games work best with our touch controls. As time goes by, users will begin developing games that will be optimized to work specifically for mobile devices. For now, we’re curious to see what existing games are most popular among our mobile audience.