Preview ROBLOX’s New Prototype Character Bodies

By Andrew Haak - June 16, 2012

If you’ve been following the ROBLOX blog for the past few months, you’ve probably seen one of our three hotly debated “Character Explorations” posts, in which we’ve shown the ongoing design progress for our version-3.0 character models. Love them or not, your feedback has helped shape the look of the future ROBLOX.

This time around, we’ve taken the new 3D bodies to the next level by creating fully dressed, personality-rich prototype characters and putting them into motion. Check out this post for a video preview from ROBLOX Art Director Jonathan Jahr.

Defining a New Genre with ROBLOX “Build and Battle”

By Andrew Haak - June 15, 2012

Game creation and game play are two cornerstones of the ROBLOX platform. While they’re usually exclusive activities in separate environments, the ROBLOX Content Team’s newest project, Build and Battle, blends the two to create a team-based game where victory demands strategy and a fierce, competitive spirit.

Using Run Length Encoding (RLE) to Compress ROBLOX Terrain

By Daniel Ignatoff - June 13, 2012

ROBLOX released its high-performance terrain feature late in 2011, allowing users to create and play games significantly larger than anything previously seen on the platform. Many ROBLOX users have since taken advantage of terrain, particularly to facilitate expansive games with fast vehicles. Currently, the ROBLOX Content Team is pushing the feature further than ever before with a new game that procedurally generates destructible, cliff- and gold-ridden terrain each round (we’ll have more on that soon).

Terrain can be up to 2048 x 256 x 2048 studs in dimension, containing up to 16 million 4 x 4 x 4 terrain cells, with no graphics slow-down. One of the supporting techniques we use to make terrain so scalable and efficient is Run Length Encoding. Run Length Encoding makes the file sizes of terrain places a small fraction of what it would be with normal parts.

ROBLOX Preps for RGC 2012 with Mock Hackathon

By Andrew Haak - June 11, 2012

Last week, we announced that ROBLOX Game Conference 2012 will feature an all-day Hackathon, where attendees can use their scripting and logic skills to come up with quick solutions to ROBLOX puzzles. We put the idea to practice on Friday afternoon, gathering eight ROBLOX developers for our own mock Hackathon. The winning developers, known on ROBLOX as “QuantumSama” and “HotThoth“, didn’t receive tangible prizes — actual RGC participants will — but a brief Friday evening of bragging rights.

The mock Hackathon gave us a chance to test several challenges, a timer and leaderboard system, and helped us see some ways we can make this event fun for ROBLOX users of many tiers. Watch this video for an inside look at our dry run on Friday, June 8th.

Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: June 10, 2012

By Andrew Haak - June 10, 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: Water, ROBLOX Game Conference updates, potato cannons and more.

Water is running in ROBLOX

By a long shot, the talk of the week was water. We’ve already seen a number of interesting creations using ROBLOX’s physically simulated water, and we’re excited to see more users take advantage of it in the near future. Read on for ROBLOX users’ thoughts on the kinds of water-based creations they’d like to see in the future.

ROBLOX Hosting a Hackathon at Game Conference 2012

By Becky Lee Herndon - June 8, 2012

Do you consider yourself an elite ROBLOX game designer? Do your friends secretly marvel at your architectural competence and scripting prowess? Can you produce under the pressure of limited time? If so, we invite you to bring your laptop to ROBLOX Game Conference 2012 and join us for a continuous, all-day Hackathon.

The ROBLOX Game Conference 2012 Hackathon will let attendees take a break from the festivities and enjoy a session of ROBLOX creation. Every 20 or so minutes, a ROBLOX developer will unveil a new puzzle, challenging users to complete it in a given period of time. While we can’t give away any specifics, we’ll be asking competitors to do things like create a new GUI (graphic user interface) or game effect, script a specific sequence of behaviors, solve programming and math puzzles, and take advantage of a ROBLOX feature that’s not commonly used.

Testing the Accuracy of ROBLOX Physics with Potato Cannons

By Sorcus - June 7, 2012

ROBLOX is built on a comprehensive physics engine, and our developers are constantly optimizing it so it can handle interactions between more physics objects and players, in an increasingly accurate and consistent way. We recently put our engine to the test with a new projectile-motion simulator – and most satisfying armament – the ROBLOX Potato Cannon. According to the results, which we describe in this article, we’re on the right trajectory.

The ROBLOX Potato Cannon mimics its real-world counterpart, a contraption traditionally constructed using a pipe and some means of generating air pressure. The difference is our potato cannon automatically performs the calculations you need to hit your target. We constructed the potato cannon so it computes the launch angle and, with the velocity at a constant 300 studs/second, the correct trajectory for your now-deadly potato. If your target is outside its range, it defaults to the maximum distance it can shoot.