Every so often, we ask our users to let us know what they’d like to see in ROBLOX, then respond to some of the most insightful comments and pertinent questions. This time, John Shedletsky, ROBLOX’s Creative Director, responds to the final round of great feedback from our “top-three” survey earlier this year. He elaborates on a variety of topics, including unlocking right-click for FPS games, weather in ROBLOX, allowing custom part shapes and a higher part limit, and more. Kevin He also chimes in with responses to your physics-related feedback. You can read previous entries in this ongoing series here.

The power of right-clicking

Unlock right-clicking (Vengroe). Right-clicking is how I and many other FPS players are used to zooming the camera. Plus, I’m sure there could be other uses for it.

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Early last week, ROBLOX launched Game Passes, which give game developers a simple, new way to leverage an old trick – charging players for access to premium abilities and content – and further profit off their creations. We’ve seen hundreds of developers add Game Passes to their games, and some have proven very successful, for very different reasons.

Top Grossing Game Passes

We dug into our Game Pass data to find out what passes have been successful so far. What’s interesting about the top three most profitable Game Passes is that they use varying price structures and incentives to turn a profit.

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We’ve talked previously about our ongoing effort to build robust joints and motors, and even touched on implementing seats for boats that support rear propellers. We’re still ironing out bugs with our soon-to-be released robust joints and motors, but we decided to release our new boat seat and water propeller support first. These features function independently, letting you experiment with propellers and watercraft today. Though this blog post features some pretty complex ideas in terms of building, we are hard at work on streamlining these building methods in the future so they’re intuitive for all uses. For now, check out what we’ve got so far.

In order to understand the changes we’ve made to ROBLOX’s water physics, let’s discuss how a propeller works, particularly in water. Like tires on a car, propellers convert power into forward motion by rapidly spinning at just the right speed, velocity, and most importantly, angle. The faster they spin, the faster your water-based vehicle should propel forward.

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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: selling premium access to your game using Game Passes, ROBLOX named one of TIME’s 50 best websites of 2012, the richest ROBLOX users, running a successful Personal Build Server and more.

Follow in the footsteps of MMO giants with Game Passes

The MMO industry is shifting from a traditional subscription model, where you pay upfront to have access to a game, to a “freemium” model, where the basic features of a game are free to play and you pay to access premium content. While ROBLOX users had already found a way to replicate this trend using “VIP T-shirts,” we introduced Game Passes to make it easier to set up and sell special access in your ROBLOX games. You can check out our blog post for an introduction to setting up a Game Pass, and this ROBLOX Wiki entry for help with giving your Game Pass an in-game effect.

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Last week we released our first ROBLOX Game Template, which gives you the starting tools you need to create a Capture the Flag FPS. While the simplicity with which ROBLOX users can create FPS games using templates opens the doors to just about anyone, it also means it’s going to take extra effort to transcend the competition and get noticed.

With that in mind, we’ll explain some useful ways you can take your ROBLOX FPS to the next level.

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Currency in ROBLOX, whether Robux or tickets, is in a constant state of movement. Our currency is bought, traded and sold at all hours of the day and night, and some of our users have found unique and creative ways to fill their ROBLOX wallets. How do we know? We reached out to the wealthiest users on ROBLOX to see if they’d care to share their methods with the community at large. Like true entrepreneurs, they were willing to share some of the secrets behind their collective success. We’ve compiled tips from some of the richest ROBLOX users out there, but we’re saving the best for last. Next week, we’ll have tips from the bar-none, top three wealthiest people on ROBLOX. For now, here are tips from four through seven.

User Merely is co-creator of the uber-popular Catalog Heaven, which has been visited over 8 million times. He has developed very specific methods for accumulating wealth utilizing Limited items. Here’s some of his insight.

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Personal Build Servers launched just under a year ago and, since then, have spawned creations impressive for their colors, senses of place and especially scale – many are home to tens of thousands of parts. At the time of this writing, there are 283,000 servers anyone can join and, at the least, explore.

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