UlrichStern25 has always had a fascination with pirates–like many of our intrepid builders, that passion eventually manifested itself in ROBLOX. Turns out he’s been hard at work creating some of the most detailed watercraft we’ve ever seen on ROBLOX, based primarily on his fascination with the high seas.

Pirates of the Caribbean Ship Showcase is a good place to start–this is where UlrichStern25 painstakingly recreated every major ship in the movie franchise, and the detail in each of the ships is mind blowing. Whether it’s from afar, or right there on deck, these massively detailed ships look like photographs of real life sea craft. Masts and sails shoot majestically into the air, cannons are tucked away in compartments in the decks below, some battle-torn and withered, some new and shiny.  Make sure to use the Teleport tool to move quickly between each ship, and to explore all they have to offer.

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Only a small fraction of ROBLOXia’s current population will actually get to attend the sold-out BLOXcon in person this summer. As much as we’d like to show up in every town and throw a live BLOXcon for you and your friends, we haven’t yet mastered the technology or hired the couple thousand minions we’d need to make that possible. Instead, we’re going to show up via the series of tubes that are The Internet this September for a virtual BLOXcon! While we hammer out the details of the event, save this date: Saturday, September 21st.

What do we have in mind for the virtual equivalent of BLOXcon? We’re planning to:

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For many, today marks the unofficial beginning of summer. School is either done or about to be done for the year, and that means you’ll be able to celebrate three glorious months of freedom from the daily grind.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a load of ROBLOX themed activities you can be taking part in, right now. So if you’ve got some spare time this sunny season, here are some things you can work on to keep busy!

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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: our custom-built binary file format, the BLOXcon poster contest, level design expertise from MahPizzaIsHere, an inspiring story (and video) from our “mini-BLOXcon” at Maker Faire, the Memorial Day Sale, a roundup of recent ROBLOX press, Ye Olde’ Village by ClonedFett35, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

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Seven-day Blog Recap

Our custom-built binary file format

As our developers release new features that expand the limits of the ROBLOX engine, new problems occasionally surface. For instance, we’ve made it much easier for builders to create huge ROBLOX places with tens of thousands of parts, but the amount of data in such worlds tends to result in unwieldy file sizes. We tackled that problem head-first by not just improving the way we store ROBLOX place data, but completely rewriting our file format for efficient storage. Arseny devised brilliant methods to make our custom file format super efficient, and the benefits stand to make the entire ROBLOX experience better — in an intentionally subtle way. It’s a dense article, but, if nothing else, a good insight into the problems our developers encounter and solve every day.

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We’re already running a contest to collect submissions for the ROBLOX International Film Festival, but we thought it only fair to give the graphic designers of ROBLOXia an equal opportunity to make their mark on our upcoming BLOXcon events. To that end, we’ve launched a poster contest, where you have a chance to design a BLOXcon poster and win fantastic prizes!

Here’s how it works: starting immediately, you can design and submit a BLOXcon poster for BLOXcon Chicago, BLOXcon London or BLOXcon New York City. We’ll be collecting submissions through June 2nd at 11:59 p.m. PT, and will select winners during the following week. Winners will have their poster printed and distributed at BLOXcon, receive a framed print of their poster signed by ROBLOX admins, and get an exclusive virtual prize for their ROBLOX character! Click here to view the contest, get started on your submission and see other entries. Simply complete the submission form and upload your poster design to enter.

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Think about the performance improvements and rendering features we’ve brought to ROBLOX in the last year. Among them are featherweight parts, fast clusters, efficient collision detection and dynamic lighting. These improvements have crushed the limits – on part count, physics simulation and aesthetic flexibility – builders once encountered and opened doors to a world of possibilities. They’ve also exposed new limits as builders have pushed the boundaries further than ever. In this article, we’ll explain how we’ve achieved an approximately 100x reduction in the file size of ROBLOX places and a 5-10x reduction in load/save time.

Think about featherweight parts. The feature, which now applies to all ROBLOX parts (as opposed to only select shapes and materials), allows you to create a ROBLOX place with tens of thousands of bricks, and have it run on both desktop and mobile devices. However, a place with tens of thousands of parts can result in a very large file. Our test place, which we’ll reference throughout this article, has 50,000 parts and weighs in at a whopping 230 megabytes. That’s big enough to affect builders in multiple ways: rendering, saving/loading, publishing, loading the place from a server and more.

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