ROBLOX: Gaming in the Cloud

By John Shedletsky - February 28, 2013

A hot topic among game studios in recent years is the notion of “cloud-based gaming”–a tectonic shift in the infrastructure behind multiplayer online games. Gone are the days of hosting your own server, opening up your firewall, forwarding ports in your router, and sacrificing a goat in order to be able to host your own multiplayer environment. In a traditional solution, if you wanted to play game with friends on the internet, you’d set up a game server and have your friends connect to it. We decided early on that this was a method we wanted to avoid–encouraging users to set up local hosting often results in a plethora of problems that interfere with stable gameplay.

Automated Web Testing: Where Quality and Efficiency Meet

By Andrew Haak - February 27, 2013

In this article, web engineers Antoni Choudhuri and Brandon Chothia discuss ROBLOX’s commitment to quality via automated web testing, and what the future holds for our testing infrastructure.

Spotlight: Infinite Replayability With Obby Lobby 2.0

By Alan Fackler - February 26, 2013

Users Smellypencil and FunFish7098 have created a game that is innovative, challenging, and most importantly, a heck of a lot of fun. Obby Lobby 2.0 takes many familiar tropes about ROBLOX obstacle courses (or obbies for short) and flips them on their head. The result is a game with staggering amounts of replayability.

Though many are visually innovative, most obstacle courses on ROBLOX follow the same rules (and there’s nothing wrong with that, mind you). You build a gigantic obstacle course that players can complete at their leisure. Obby Lobby 2.0 plays by no such rules. The game splits each round into frantic races to the finish line–you’ve got four minutes per round to complete the obstacle course before your opponents do, which involves some intense on-the-spot thinking.

ROBLOX Users: Part of Our Development Team

By Alan Fackler - February 25, 2013

ROBLOX is a user generated platform at it’s core. We make the tools, then leave it up to you to utilize them in new and innovative ways. We need your feedback as game developers and builders to help us ensure that our tools are giving you as much power and efficiency as possible.

User feedback and participation are cornerstones of ROBLOX’s elaborate testing infrastructure, and play a large role in dictating what exactly we work on here at HQ. Unlike other online games, ROBLOX is under constant development. The direction that development takes is dictated by our players. In a very real way, our users are part of our development team.

Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: February 24, 2013

By Andrew Haak - February 24, 2013

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: a significant boost in physics performance, behind the scenes with Customer Service, Gamehero’s MIDI player in ROBLOX, Behind the BLOX, an invitation to ROBLOX HQ, we respond to your questions and ideas, Ozzypig’s latest hit game Juggernaut, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Seven-day Blog Recap

Speeding up ROBLOX’s physics by optimizing collisions

ROBLOX physics guru Kevin He has changed the way our physics engine models collisions between parts to boost its speed by 2-4x. What does this mean to you, the builder and player? More simultaneous moving parts without slowdown and, arguably more importantly, more epic explosions. You can read all about the shift from modeling collisions with “springs” to “impulses” — and see some telling video evidence of its benefits — by checking out Kevin’s in-depth article.

Impulse Solver Gives ROBLOX’s Physics a Serious Speed Boost

By Kevin He - February 23, 2013

In late 2012, a significant fraction of ROBLOX developers worked together to make games run on performance-constrained hardware (iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, to be exact). The team set off on an exhaustive hunt for inefficient processes within the ROBLOX source code, then found ways to optimize the problem areas that had substantial performance payoffs. This allowed us to bring the full in-game multiplayer ROBLOX experience to mobile devices in December, but we did have to make a concession: there would not be a destructible environment in ROBLOX Battle. The physics simulation was too resource intensive.

Soon, that’s going to change, as Kevin He has altered the way ROBLOX handles collisions – one of the major components of our distributed physics engine. Better yet, you’re about to see a 2-4x increase in physics performance across all games and hardware.

Go Behind the BLOX Starting Next Friday!

By Brad Justus - February 22, 2013

We’re always focusing on new ways to strengthen the connection between our ourselves and our users–ROBLOX wouldn’t be the same without the feedback we receive from our passionate builders and gamers. Behind the BLOX is your unique opportunity to visit the heart of Robloxia: the ROBLOX HQ in San Mateo, CA.