On July 28, 2012, user Yaman100 did something thousands of users do without a second thought every day: put a new t-shirt on his ROBLOX character. Only, this time it was special. It set off a bug, with approximately one-in-four-billion chances of occurring, that would end up breaking any ROBLOX page on which Yaman100′s character thumbnail appeared.
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When creating a game in ROBLOX Studio, the scope, playability, and overall enjoyment of it is entirely in your hands. We’re here to give you the tools you need to build, and ensure that you can share your games with others. But hitting the “publish” button kicks off a series of events that are remarkable. And, like our “Play Button” article we wrote previously, we’d like to share with you the complexities behind publishing a game using ROBLOX.
So you’ve finished your game, and you’re ready to share it with the ROBLOX community. You hit “Publish”. Now two parts of our system–the web side, and the client side–begin working together to rocket your game into our cloud based storage system, backed ultimately by Amazon S3.
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If you are developing a scripting language, it turns out that allowing clients to load and execute arbitrary bytecode is a really bad idea. Lua, the embedded scripting language that ROBLOX uses, unfortunately allows this by default. After some deliberation, we decided to remove this capability from ROBLOX Lua.
Continue reading During our annual Hack Week, ROBLOX developers shifted gears, working tirelessly to devise and present ideas fueled more by creativity than priority. This week, we’ll be featuring some of the most innovative ideas to come out of Hack Week. Our second story is about some changes that will be implemented to ROBLOX’s robust GUIs (graphical user interfaces), by Software Engineers Deepak Chandrasekaran and Tyler Mullen.
At ROBLOX Game Conference 2012, Kevin He dissected the steps he’s taken to refine ROBLOX’s water physics, hinges and motors so that vehicles – especially boats – perform more realistically. In this blog post, we’re recapping the key parts of the development process. You might be surprised at how much work goes into physically simulating real-world machines in a life-like fashion.
ROBLOX’s water, released in June, gives you the ability to create a boat that floats based on actual physical properties, rather than lines of Lua code. While the release of water marked a big step forward for ROBLOX, it has its limits; for example, if you want to create a propeller-powered boat, the propellers have to be on the side of the boat, as though they’re mimicking wheels on a car.
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ROBLOX introduced groups in 2009, and, today, there are over 600,000 users in groups. While our community already uses them to organize, communicate, and battle, there are improvements we’d like to make and features we’d like to implement. At RGC 2012, Software Engineer Navin Lal premiered some of our ideas.
Groups are one of the features on ROBLOX that continue to garner interest and support from our users. Today, I’ll be outlining some of the plans we have for ROBLOX groups. We are, indeed, actively working on many of these features, while others are just ideas, so please feel free to leave any feedback in the comments section. We do not yet have any definitive release dates for the changes outlined in this article.
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Over the past several months, Client Engine Lead Simon Kozlov has been working on some prototype videos that showcase the potential look of ROBLOX in the future. He shared them at ROBLOX Game Conference 2012, and now we’re showing them to the community at large. It’s important to note that these videos are prototypes and there is no projected release date, but the differences are staggering.
“We spent a lot of time talking about what kind of look is right look for ROBLOX,” said Kozlov. “We looked at a lot of different types of effects to determine what works and what doesn’t.”
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