Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: July 1, 2012

By Andrew Haak - July 1, 2012

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: RGC 2012, responding to your feedback, new character parts and more.

ROBLOX Game Conference 2012

ROBLOX Game Conference 2012 is approaching. Fast. There’s a lot of content on the docket so, this week, we unveiled a detailed schedule of events. If you’re coming to the conference, take a look and make note of the sessions you’d like to attend. A little planning will help ensure you see everything that’s important and interesting to you. Let us know what you events you’re anticipating the most.

Responding to User Feedback, V5

By John Shedletsky - June 30, 2012

Ever since we made the request for your ROBLOX “Top Three,” we’ve been combing through the feedback and responding to your most insightful comments and pertinent questions. This week, John Shedletsky, ROBLOX’s Creative Director and Content Lead, elaborates on a variety of topics, including additional sound capabilities, leveling up, GUI development and ROBLOX for 13+ users. Plus, a short tutorial on CFraming. For previous entries in this series, click here.

Sound

SuperSy: Add more sound choices to ROBLOX instead of picking them out of gear. Like the sound of a river, or the sound a fire crackling. Some advanced players can modify the tunes of gears and make this happen. For others, it would be great to have them readily available.

Confirmed: ROBLOX Game Conference 2012 Event Schedule

By Becky Lee Herndon - June 29, 2012

ROBLOX Game Conference 2012 runs from 10 a.m. to about 4:30 p.m – six-and-a-half hours. Between the main stage, user feedback sessions and Hackathon, we have roughly 15 hours of scheduled content to offer. Unless you possess the ability to be in two places at the same time, you’re going to need to prioritize.

To help you plan, we’re announcing a detailed agenda of events. Please note that this schedule may change slightly, so keep an eye on the RGC 2012 page for updates.

An Open Letter to ROBLOX about Our Third-Gen Character Parts

By David Baszucki - June 28, 2012

We have a big vision. The future of ROBLOX is an online world where many physical phenomena are simulated. Ultimately, wind will blow small parts around, metal wires will conduct electricity, lasers will cause wooden parts to burst into flame, magnets will attract parts made of iron, and water will freeze, flow and vaporize. This is not a world that will be composed only of blocks. Our characters will evolve and adapt to live in this world.

Buy Tickets Online and Avoid the Lines at RGC 2012

By Becky Lee Herndon - June 22, 2012

We have a lot of content planned for ROBLOX Game Conference 2012, but there’s only so much time for you to experience as much of it as you can. That said, we strongly recommend you buy tickets online so you don’t waste any of your valuable time standing in line at the ticket counter. Plus, if you buy your ticket online by June 29, you’ll receive extra virtual gear.

To purchase RGC 2012 tickets, click here. The event will offer a variety of speakers, including CEO and Founder David Baszucki and Creative Director John Shedletsky, interactive feedback sessions, a ROBLOX computer lab, and a Hackathon, where attendees can put their programming and building skills to the test to win prizes. Keep an eye on the RGC 2012 Agenda page and our blog for further details in the coming weeks.

Speeding ROBLOX.com with Message Queuing

By Gigi Sayfan - June 19, 2012

In an April blog post, Supporting Millions of Players at ROBLOX, we mapped out ROBLOX’s back-end web technology. Today, Gigi Sayfan discusses message queuing, a single component nestled in our greater web infrastructure, and how it helps us accelerate updates to our huge catalog and the user-account search function. He also offers practical advice on setting up a message queuing application for a specific set of goals.

In a common, distributed web application architecture, multiple web servers talk directly to a database and/or to back-end services that relay messages to the database. ROBLOX has millions of users, who constantly bombard our many web servers with requests that eventually funnel into the database. If the database is busy, it will be slow to respond to requests – both from the web servers and back-end services – and the user experience will suffer. Worst case scenario, requests time out.

Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: June 17, 2012

By Andrew Haak - June 17, 2012

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: Build and Battle, ROBLOX’s mock Hackathon, character models, terrain and more.

Build and Battle: A new breed of ROBLOX game

Build and Battle is a team-based shooter where the objective is to take out your opponent’s energy core. Sounds simple enough, right? ROBLOX’s Content team ran with the basic foundation, introducing randomly generated terrain, resource collection, base building and more. You can read all about it and watch a video featuring ROBLOX developer Rohan, or jump right into a match.