ROBLOX’s streak of fantastic rendering updates goes yet another step further today with the release of updated material textures and a starter-pack of brand new options. The updated and new textures increment the visual quality of all games on all the platforms (desktop and mobile) we support, while simultaneously giving you more flexibility to build perfectly engrossing worlds and levels.

We’ve been carefully listening to your feedback as we’ve changed the look of ROBLOX over the last six months. For instance, we prioritized the development of dynamic shadows in our lighting engine and gave you full control over the appearance of outlines. While we’re not giving you the option to toggle new materials on and off, we’d like to hear your constructive criticism, success stories and requests for additional materials. If we notice many people sharing an opinion, we may tweak or add the material in question. The best way for you to make your case is to upload and share screenshots — whether the materials make something you’ve built look exceptional or flawed.

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Every week, we’re busy telling the stories behind our community, 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: new streaming parts feature, you can change your username, the winners of the costume contest, polishing and adding content to The Witching Hour, a Crossfire featuring the Darkness and The Stalker devs, Dungeon Delver‘s quality Halloween update, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

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Last month, we talked with ROBLOX Engineer Yunpeng Zhu about prototyping and testing our new streaming parts system in our test environment. After gathering a ton of useful feedback we’re proud to announce that this new feature has been implemented on ROBLOX, and you can enable it in any one of your places or games starting today. This means other players will be able to enter your game at lighting-fast speeds, and will allow players with older hardware to run large games more smoothly. To start, we thought we’d walk you through how to implement this exciting new feature in ROBLOX Studio. We also got the chance to talk to a pair of builders about their experiences with part streaming and how it’s changed their mentalities.

Enabling streaming parts in Studio

To begin, open your place in Studio. Select your Workspace from the Explorer panel (View > Explorer), and you’ll notice a brand new checkbox in the Properties (View > Properties) called “StreamingEnabled”. For most games, enabling this feature is as easy as checking that box. If you have a game that depends heavily on LocalScripts, you might need to make some adjustments to those scripts in order to make them work properly. You can find out how to do this, as well as a ton of other useful information and tips, at the ROBLOX Wiki. We’ve also given you the tools you need to immediately test part streaming in your game to ensure that everything is working properly before you upload it back to ROBLOX.

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Before we announce the winners of the BLOXtober Costume Contest, let’s step back and look at just how it shook out. In total, we received 17,000 costume submissions over the course of a roughly three-day entry window. We then launched into the weekend voting period, where you all worked incredibly hard on the forums and social media – just look at the #BLOXtober tweet stream for evidence – to get your entry noticed. Based on the more than 200,000 votes cast, your efforts made a big difference.

Now, entrants, take a deep breath. You’re about to find out whether you made the cut.

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ROBLOX has been growing quickly for upwards of six years. In that time, many members of our community have grown along with us — so much so that some builders no longer feel their username accurately represents who they are on ROBLOX, and what they represent. Rather than require those of you in this situation to start fresh with an empty account, we’ve decided to launch a new feature: the ability to change your username.

Each username change costs 1,000 ROBUX. In order to make it happen, click on the Account link in the navigation bar. You’ll notice a large green button next to your username that says “Change My Username”. Clicking that button will launch a pop-up window guiding you through the process.To make the swap, type in your desired username and confirm your identity by entering your password. The menu will not let you go any further if your desired username is already taken. Once you’re ready, hit the “Buy for R1,000″ button, and you’ll receive a confirmation that you’ve successfully purchased the name, exactly as it’s spelled, that you desire.

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