Nine Days Remain to Enter the Virtual BLOXcon Game Contest

Virtual BLOXcon LogoLast week, we kicked off a Virtual BLOXcon Game Contest, giving you the opportunity to have your BLOXcon-themed game featured at the big event on Saturday, September 21st. We know making a game and building a place are both time-consuming processes, so take this as a friendly reminder that the contest deadline is nine days away (technically, Sunday, September 8th at 11:59 p.m. PT).

In case you missed the news last week, here’s how the contest works.

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Crossfire: TheGamer101 & Loleris Talk Sword Fighting

crossfireswordsCreativity 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 users TheGamer101 and loleris, creators of Sword Fighting Tournament and Intense Sword Fighting, respectively. Both games focus on strategic (surprise!) sword fighting–though that’s where the similarities end. With the recent upswing in popularity of Intense Sword Fighting (the game is just over a week old), this Crossfire article was a no-brainer.

ROBLOX: Thanks for being a part of this guys! There seems to be a real feud going on between your two games. What was your strategy in promoting your game and making it popular?

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Labor Day Weekend Sale Runs This Friday Through Monday

Labor-Day-Weekend-Sale-2013Monday is Labor Day, and we can think of no better way to celebrate than a sale! Throughout the weekend, we’ll be debuting new items, putting certain items on sale, publishing community-created re-textures, temporarily bringing back offsale items, and more! The sale starts Friday, but today we decided to preview some of the items that will be featured. The items in this article are only a small portion of the total available items during the sale, so be sure to keep your eye on the catalog to take advantage of all the great deals! The Labor Day Weekend Sale will begin Friday, August 30th, and run through Monday, September 2nd.

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Exploring the Possibilities of Articulated Physics in ROBLOX

We’ve been working on testing and implementing a new articulated physics engine, which will offer more robust support for joints and motors, and more accuracy. We have a vision for ROBLOX where builders have the freedom to create the most complex mechatronic creations they can imagine, and simulate them in real time with other players. This has been a long and challenging process, but the video below illustrates the progress we’ve made so far.

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Preview ROBLOX Studio’s Better, Faster Dragger Tool

It’s been a while since we told you anything new about ROBLOX Studio, but it’s a constant work in progress and a focus of our engineering core. In fact, we recently added a senior software engineer to the Studio team, dedicated a web engineer to Studio development, and are seeking to add a couple more positions. Good things are in store for those of you who build and develop using Studio.

Since the launch of Studio 2013 in February, the team has been hard at work making it a more stable and efficient product. Today, we have a much-improved “dragger” tool to preview. This update will drastically improve the speed at which you can move large groups of parts – for example, skyscrapers, houses, castles, etc. – around your ROBLOX worlds.

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Six Awesome Builds You Need to See to Believe

Stratosphere Settlement by EBRIf it seems like we’re featuring more community-created games and worlds lately, it’s because we are — with your help, we’re finding more incredible uses of ROBLOX’s tools and becoming more connected with the building and development communities. As usual, this gallery features a variety of places that have a criminally small number of visits. You should join us in remedying that today by paying a visit to these six places you have to see to believe.

The Pavilion by junior7777

ThinkBuildCreate's The Pavilion

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Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: August 25th, 2013

Weekly ROBLOX Roundup Logo, V2Every 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 Battle goes open source, a Virtual BLOXcon contest (and other news), the binary file format rollout, the technology behind outlines, a great new Feedback Loop article, a Spotlight on the creator of Sandbox, Coastline Highway and Sea Breeze Home, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.


Seven-day Blog Recap

ROBLOX Battle goes open source

ROBLOX Battle: Big PictureOver the past couple months, we’ve been covering the development of ROBLOX Battle, which has transitioned from a classic deathmatch arena to a game loaded with play modes, tactical choices, social spaces and more. Most recently, Sorcus — who’s been leading the charge on the game’s overhaul — explained how everything the Game Team did to the game has been informed by player metrics. In particular, the team used an in-game statistics GUI, which tracks player behaviors and is now available for you to try as part of the entire ROBLOX Battle now-open-source code base.

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