The ROBLOX Presidents Day Sale Starts February 15th

By Christina McGrath - February 14, 2013

Over the next seven days — Friday the 15th through Friday the 22nd — ROBLOX is playing host to a massive Presidents Day Sale. And when we say “massive,” we mean it. Not only are we discounting select hats and gear by 30-50%, we’re making a number of items limited, putting currently unavailable items back on sale, releasing user-created hats as official ROBLOX hats, and launching a new round of gear for the week. We’re going to keep you busy.

ROBLOX Studio 2013: Recent and Impending Fixes

By Tim Brown - February 13, 2013

Change is at the core of our platform. ROBLOX Studio 2013 will be constantly updated throughout the year, often multiple times per week. There’s been a wide range of tweaks and enhancements made to Studio in the last couple of weeks–a lot in response to useful feedback we’ve gotten from our users. We’re here with Tim Brown, ROBLOX Studio Team Lead, to give you an update on what’s new.

The ROBLOX Studio team has heard your feedback and wants to thank you for your patience. We’ve learned a lot over the past week about how our users use our product, often in ways we didn’t expect, and we’re working to make sure that your experience is at least as good in ROBLOX Studio 2013. We’ve been working hard over the past week to identify issues people are having with Studio 2013, prioritize them, and fix them. We’ve made a lot of improvements so far, and have a lot more going out this week.

In Memory of Erik Cassel

By David Baszucki - February 12, 2013

Dear ROBLOX Community,

Yesterday morning, Erik Cassel, my co-founder at ROBLOX, passed away. Erik had been battling cancer for the past three years and his passing is a deep loss. I have worked with Erik for over 20 years, first at a company called Knowledge Revolution, then since the start of ROBLOX. I would like to tell you about Erik, and how his incredible talents continue to shine through in ROBLOX.

Redeem ROBLOX Cards in February and Get This Free Gear

By Christina McGrath - February 11, 2013

You can buy ROBLOX cards – redeemable for Builders Club subscriptions and Robux – at retailers around the world. It pays to be strategic about where you buy them, though, as ROBLOX cards from specific retailers come bundled with stylish and/or esteemed virtual gear. Here’s what you’ll get for redeeming ROBLOX cards from specific retailers before the end of February.

Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: February 10, 2013

By Andrew Haak - February 10, 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: the release of ROBLOX Studio 2013 (and subsequent bug fixes), a new, voxel-based prototype for dynamic lighting, the democratization of game development (with litozinnamon), the ROBLOX modeling scene, an RGC 2013 location announcement, Checkpoint Racing by Wingman8, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Seven-day Blog Recap

ROBLOX Studio 2013: the launch and aftermath

Last week, we announced the arrival of ROBLOX Studio 2013, the much more stable and platform-independent version of our building tool. We’ve been soliciting and reading through your feedback, and we recognize we haven’t yet perfected the Studio 2013 experience; thus, we’ve been fixing bugs as quickly as possible and even made an old version of Studio available for download for a limited time.

RGC 2013: This Summer, We’re Coming to You!

By Andrew Haak - February 9, 2013

A couple weeks ago, we released a survey to find out where we should host ROBLOX Game Conference 2013. Since then, we’ve been leaking bits and pieces of information via the ROBLOX forums and Twitter, but not so much that we slowed the rumor mill. Will there be more than one? Where will they be held? Are there really going to be hobos? Today, we’re clearing the air – partially, at least.

There will, in fact, be three ROBLOX Game Conferences, in three separate locations. First up will be RGC Chicago on July 13th, 2013. The venue? The Museum of Science and Industry, right on the shore of Lake Michigan. We’re heading east from there. Waaay east. The second RGC will be in (drumroll… wait for it… the suspense!)… London! We’ll be there for a day of awesomeness on July 27th, 2013. It’ll be a proper good time, it will. Then we’ll be stateside again for the third RGC in August, but you’ll have to wait and see exactly where.

Dynamic Lighting and Shadows: The Voxel Solution

By Arseny Kapoulkine - February 7, 2013

Graphics gurus Simon Kozlov and Arseny Kapoulkine have been hard at work prototyping a ROBLOX lighting system that uses voxels to create dynamic shadows and lights that can be placed anywhere.

A constant challenge for us is improving the ROBLOX world while keeping it scalable–as much as we want ROBLOX to look and feel like a triple-A video game, we have to make sure a wide range of hardware can handle it. With that in mind, we’ve created a lighting and shadows prototype that not only drastically changes the look of our game, but can also run on a range of different machines. In order to create this new look, we’re developing a dynamic light and shadow engine where most of the heavy lifting is done on the CPU (instead of the graphics card) and we’re leveraging a voxel-based data structure to do it.