New Material Textures Are Now Live

By Arseny Kapoulkine - October 28, 2013

ROBLOX’s streak of fantastic rendering updates goes yet another step further today with the release of updated material textures and a starter-pack of brand new options. The updated and new textures increment the visual quality of all games on all the platforms (desktop and mobile) we support, while simultaneously giving you more flexibility to build perfectly engrossing worlds and levels.

We’ve been carefully listening to your feedback as we’ve changed the look of ROBLOX over the last six months. For instance, we prioritized the development of dynamic shadows in our lighting engine and gave you full control over the appearance of outlines. While we’re not giving you the option to toggle new materials on and off, we’d like to hear your constructive criticism, success stories and requests for additional materials. If we notice many people sharing an opinion, we may tweak or add the material in question. The best way for you to make your case is to upload and share screenshots — whether the materials make something you’ve built look exceptional or flawed.

Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: October 27th, 2013

By Andrew Haak - October 27, 2013

Every week, we’re busy telling the stories behind our community, 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: new streaming parts feature, you can change your username, the winners of the costume contest, polishing and adding content to The Witching Hour, a Crossfire featuring the Darkness and The Stalker devs, Dungeon Delver‘s quality Halloween update, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Crossfire: Clonetrooper1019 and Loleris Avoid the Light

By Alan Fackler - October 25, 2013

Creativity and sharing are two qualities that fuel ROBLOX, and it’s in that spirit we created Crossfire, a series where we chat with ROBLOX game developers about their game design choices. For this outing, we interviewed loleris and CloneTrooper1019, creators of Darkness, and The Stalker, respectively. These are two seasoned ROBLOX veterans who have both participated in separate Crossfires in the past, but their two games, which are among the most popular games at the moment, are competing too closely to ignore.

ROBLOX: Thanks for doing this guys. So, on a surface level, both of your games are really similar. What would you say is the biggest difference between your games?

More Quests and Prizes Coming to The Witching Hour

By Sorcus - October 25, 2013

There are still more BLOXikins to collect, and companions to aid you on your quest!

The horizon and scope of ROBLOX games are constantly expanding. Though our platform is shaped 99% by our user base of builders and game creators, our very own Games Team likes to step in every now and again to deliver a unique gameplay experience to all — and then release what we learn to the community so that you can create even better games. Last year’s Egg Hunt was a large undertaking that went over quite well, so we knew the next time we created a holiday-themed game we would want to make it even bigger. Thus, the basic idea behind BLOXtober’s Witching Hour was conceived.

Lightning Fast Loads: Streaming Is Enabled!

By Alan Fackler - October 24, 2013

Last month, we talked with ROBLOX Engineer Yunpeng Zhu about prototyping and testing our new streaming parts system in our test environment. After gathering a ton of useful feedback we’re proud to announce that this new feature has been implemented on ROBLOX, and you can enable it in any one of your places or games starting today. This means other players will be able to enter your game at lighting-fast speeds, and will allow players with older hardware to run large games more smoothly. To start, we thought we’d walk you through how to implement this exciting new feature in ROBLOX Studio. We also got the chance to talk to a pair of builders about their experiences with part streaming and how it’s changed their mentalities.

Enabling streaming parts in Studio

To begin, open your place in Studio. Select your Workspace from the Explorer panel (View > Explorer), and you’ll notice a brand new checkbox in the Properties (View > Properties) called “StreamingEnabled”. For most games, enabling this feature is as easy as checking that box. If you have a game that depends heavily on LocalScripts, you might need to make some adjustments to those scripts in order to make them work properly. You can find out how to do this, as well as a ton of other useful information and tips, at the ROBLOX Wiki. We’ve also given you the tools you need to immediately test part streaming in your game to ensure that everything is working properly before you upload it back to ROBLOX.

The Winners of the BLOXtober Costume Contest

By Andrew Haak - October 23, 2013

Before we announce the winners of the BLOXtober Costume Contest, let’s step back and look at just how it shook out. In total, we received 17,000 costume submissions over the course of a roughly three-day entry window. We then launched into the weekend voting period, where you all worked incredibly hard on the forums and social media – just look at the #BLOXtober tweet stream for evidence – to get your entry noticed. Based on the more than 200,000 votes cast, your efforts made a big difference.

Now, entrants, take a deep breath. You’re about to find out whether you made the cut.

Halloween 2013: The Witching Hour Is Now Open to Everyone

By Andrew Haak - October 22, 2013

BLOXtober continues this week with a big Tuesday announcement: our 2013 Halloween game, The Witching Hour, is now open for everyone to play! Those of you who paid for early access during either the 1,000- or 500-ROBUX phase will receive your exclusive items in the near future.

If you haven’t played the game yet, here’s a quick refresher from Sorcus’ original article about The Witching Hour: