Game Universes and the Quest for Massive Scale

By Andrew Haak - December 18, 2013

Imagine this: there’s a ROBLOX game that’s built out of 10 levels. Thousands of people are playing it and teleporting between environments at the drop of a hat. As they move from place to place, their character statistics and ever-growing in-game inventory move with them. They’re all exploring a cohesive world with impressive scale and interacting with one another as they make chance encounters on their journeys. They’re in an immersive world.

This is the impending future of ROBLOX games. Our Client, Networking, Services and Web teams are making it happen by building a robust framework of teleports, game universes and data persistence.

Put a GUI on That Surface!

By Max Volkov - December 13, 2013

In mid-November, we released GUI rotation, which allows you to rotate a GUI for such purposes as a clock or compass, among other things. Now, we’ve taken GUI functionality one step further with the release of SurfaceGUIs, which give you the ability to place a GUI on the surface of a part. This is a small piece of functionality with big potential, as it opens up the possibility of creating interactive vehicle dashboards, virtual computers, and elevator buttons, and better 3D integration of menus and important player information.

To use SurfaceGUIs, we recommend you first create your GUI as a standard ScreenGUI object in ROBLOX Studio. Once it’s created, you add a new SurfaceGUI object to the part on which you want to project the ScreenGUI. This can be accomplished by selecting the part and double-clicking the new SurfaceGUI object (View > Basic Objects). Finally, you add the components of your ScreenGUI to the SurfaceGUI by nesting them beneath the SurfaceGUI object. The SurfaceGUI will then appear on the part.

ROBLOX Enables HTTP Requests from Game Servers

By Simon Kozlov - December 12, 2013

In order to surf the web, you need a web browser. The browser functions as a bridge–whenever you type in www.roblox.com (or any URL for that matter), or click on any link or picture, your browser is making something called an HTTP Request, then displaying the results of that request on your screen. As you can no doubt imagine, there are billions of these requests made daily, as a huge volume of people browse the web, download music, play ROBLOX, and read emails from all sorts of devices. It is the single most widely used communication protocol of the modern web.

Starting today, we’re allowing developers to make these very same requests from their ROBLOX game servers. We host all ROBLOX game servers in order to allow our developers and players to focus on what matters: creating and playing high-quality games. Your game’s code lives in a cloud, and can now talk with any website on the internet. In writing this sounds like a small feature. The implications of it, however, are quite large. Developers can now use services like Google Analytics to track what’s happening in their games–the number of players, the number of active servers, the percentage of returning users–all in an effort to better understand player behaviors.

ROBLOX Enables HTTP Requests from Game Servers

By Simon Kozlov - December 12, 2013

Space Knights: The Development of a Front-Page Game

By Dan Healy - November 19, 2013

A couple of weeks ago, Sorcus unveiled that Space Knights was developed by the Games Team in an experiment to better understand the trials and tribulations of an everyday ROBLOX game developer. We learned a lot from this experiment, and want to continue to share our findings with you. For this follow-up article we tapped ROBLOX Games Team member Dan Healy, an integral member of the small team that developed Space Knights, to talk about its development. Take it away, Dan.

RaceToTheBottom Races to the Top with Space Knights

By Sorcus - November 5, 2013

Space Knights marks the single biggest gaming experiment we’ve ever attempted on ROBLOX. Now that the experiment is over, we want to tell you about it. Space Knights was developed internally, right here at ROBLOX HQ, by three members of the Games Team and me. We worked in total secrecy – outside of this team, no one else at ROBLOX knew about the project, and it was important that we kept it that way.

Developers Share Their DevEx Success Stories

By Alan Fackler - November 4, 2013

At ROBLOX, we’re working hard to build a haven for up-and-coming game developers. A place where it’s not only easy to get started with building and scripting fantastic 3D worlds, but possible to get those creations in front of an audience of millions of gamers using our cloud infrastructure — and perhaps even make some money doing it.