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: two great articulated physics demos, an inside look at the creation of crazyman32′s Nuclear Simulation, games taking advantage of the sounds feature, a dodgeball-themed Crossfire, a Spotlight on starmarine614, body packages for everyone, Laserbike Racing, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

---

Seven-day blog recap

Exploring articulated physics, part two

In our second look inside the development of our new articulated physics engine, we went big — with a towering mech and robust tank. Both demos serve to push the limits of the articulated physics engine and highlight areas for improvement. They look solid in their current state, so head over to the original blog article to view them in full.

Continue reading

We interviewed starmarine614 back in July, shortly after the introduction of Paid Access. We chatted with him because ROBLOX Point, which was still in beta at the time, was the first game to find significant success using the feature. We told him then to contact us when he was finished building his project, so I wasn’t surprised to get a message from him on ROBLOX a few days ago that read: “It’s finished, and it’s picture-ready.”

Calling ROBLOX Point “picture-ready” is a bit of an understatement, though not incorrect by any means. It’s beautiful. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s a sprawling amusement park that features some of the most advanced roller coasters we’ve experienced on our platform. Like any good theme park, there are enough rides and attractions in ROBLOX Point to make a day of exploration an exciting prospect–though the rides are the primary selling point.

Continue reading

Being that it’s BLOXtober and we’d like to see all of you running around in any costume you can dream up, we’ve decided the time is right to open our selection of body packages to everyone. Body packages are full makeovers of the standard ROBLOX character — complete with anything from hulking armor to penguin fins to peg legs — and have long been a small benefit of a Builders Club membership.

This is not a Halloween special. From here on out, body packages will release initially as Builders Club exclusives, then soon become available to any ROBLOXian who wants them. While most body packages have already made the transition, there are a few we have yet to make available to everyone. That will happen next week.

Continue reading

Creativity and sharing are two qualities that fuel ROBLOX, and it’s in that spirit that we created Crossfire, a series where we chat with ROBLOX game developers about their game design choices. For this outing, we interviewed alexnewtron and stickmasterluke, creators of ROBLOX Dodgeball, and ROBLOX Battle’s Dodgeball mode, respectively. This marks the first time we’ve chosen a ROBLOX developer to enter into a Crossfire with another user–and the conversation was totally worth it. Check it out.ROBLOX: Welcome to Crossfire guys, and thanks for participating! Our first question is simple: why dodgeball?

stickmasterluke: When we were revamping ROBLOX Battle, dodgeball was the first idea that came to mind when we were trying to come up with new game modes. It’s quick, it’s fun. It’s almost like a mini-game that just focuses on straight-up combat. There are no places to go, or areas to explore. You fight as hard and fast as you can, then it’s over.

Continue reading

The sounds feature has been out for two weeks today, and already many of our intrepid game developers have started experimenting with the feature–in some cases, they are actually building entire games around custom sounds (though we’ll touch on these particular games when they’ve had a bit more time in development)! We dug through the Games list to find some of the best uses of ROBLOX sounds yet.

Continue reading

We have a vision for ROBLOX where builders can create complex mechatronic constructs and simulate them in real time with other players. To that end, we’ve been working on implementing a new articulated physics engine, which will ultimately offer greater fidelity and more robust support for joints, motors and multiple articulated bodies. This has been a long and challenging process, but the videos below illustrate the progress we’ve made so far (and since our first article in this series).

Continue reading

Over the past couple of years I’ve spent on ROBLOX, I’d like to think I’ve come up with some pretty crazy ideas for games. With the release of dynamic lighting, I was able to create games that looked precisely as I had imagined them. Then, with the recent release of uploadable sounds, I  was finally able to bring scenes to life with audio.

As soon as sounds were released, I knew immediately I wanted to create a cinematic work. I saw the announcement when I was doing my math homework, and, well, math homework suddenly seemed less important. I flipped over a piece of grid paper and started to plot a storyline. Once I had some general ideas on paper, I wrote a title above my notes: Nuclear Simulation. With some scribbled notes and a general idea of what this was going to look like, I jumped into ROBLOX Studio and started building the first “scene” of the game.

Continue reading