Every so often, we ask our users to let us know what they’d like to see in ROBLOX, then respond to some of the most insightful comments and pertinent questions. This time, John Shedletsky, ROBLOX’s Creative Director, focuses on our upcoming mobile release. He responds to questions about mobile optimization, a future where ROBLOX and Android can play together, and security concerns, to name a few. The topics for this User Feedback session were submitted to us from users at LuaLearners, a ROBLOX scripting group/website.

Mobile Game Play

Orca101: Will games need to be as optimized as possible to run well on mobile?

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A few weeks ago, ROBLOX launched a promotion to raise awareness of its impending mobile app release: at random times throughout each day, we put an extremely limited virtual ROBLOX Tablet on sale in the Catalog. Users who own one of these rare tablets when ROBLOX Mobile officially debuts will receive brand new iPad 3s from ROBLOX.

Since we released the tablets, we’ve been monitoring trade activity to see which users purchased them. We were curious to see how many users would simply keep them (to win an iPad), and how many would leverage them to trade for other rare items. Though not every user who got a ROBLOX Tablet chose to flip it, some did–and for some valuable virtual items.

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Throughout the development process of ROBLOX for the iPad, many people across a wide variety of disciplines have focused their efforts on a single goal: build a world-class mobile ROBLOX product that matches (and in the sense of being a tight, unified app exceeds) the quality of its desktop counterpart. We’ve heard about fast-loading in-app web pages, smart optimization of memory and performance and touch-friendly controls. Today, in the last entry of the ongoing Engineering ROBLOX for the iPad series, the Content Team talks about the importance of a high-quality and cohesive user interface (UI).

Some of the UI changes we’ve been developing have already rolled out to users. Regardless of the platform on which you’re playing, you’ll see refreshed versions of a couple of ROBLOX’s key UI elements: the toolbar, backpack and chat (with an updated playerlist and scrollable chat coming soon). While these elements already have a new look, the Content Team is continuing to work toward its ultimate vision for ROBLOX’s UI. You can see one of the mock-ups of the team’s vision below.

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ROBLOX is in the process of bringing our 9.8 million user-created games to the iPad. The first release of ROBLOX Mobile that supports online play is almost here. To raise awareness in the ROBLOX community of our imminent launch, we’re running a promotion targeted at ROBLOX game developers that will give them an opportunity to win a brand-new iPad 3.

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If the first part of developing a well-performing ROBLOX experience for the iPad is ensuring stability through memory optimization, the second part is improving the frame rate to the point it’s as smooth as it is on a modern desktop or laptop computer. The process is a balancing act: push performance optimization to its limit without noticeably degrading the quality of the experience.

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One of the most important parts of developing a high-quality ROBLOX experience for the iPad is ensuring smooth, stable, steady game-play performance. iPads are not as powerful as almost any modern-day desktop computer or laptop, which means our developers have to dig deep into ROBLOX’s code, uncover problem areas and tune them to run more efficiently, while keeping game-play quality in mind. The end goal is to have quality and performance exist in harmony; the challenge is pushing performance optimization to its limit without noticeably degrading the experience.

For the past month, the Client Team has been neck-deep in ROBLOX’s source code, identifying inefficiencies and re-engineering them in exchange for quantifiable and positive impacts on performance. One of the best benchmarks for illustrating their collective progress is Crossroads, a classic level the team has been using as an iPad testing ground since September. When we first launched the ROBLOX code stack on an iPad, Crossroads with eight players ran at an unplayable five frames per second (FPS). Today, it runs at a cool 30+ FPS.

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ROBLOX isn’t your typical video game company. We’re unique in a lot of ways, one of which is our openness about what we’re working on and our plans for the future. Today, we’re happy to stop teasing and start going in-depth on our progress toward releasing ROBLOX for iPad.

ROBLOX for iPad will launch in a couple phases. First, we’ll update the existing ROBLOX Mobile app, which has been available in the App Store since 2011. The update will improve the visual style of the app and is optimized for use on iPad. It will allow us to test all non-game components of the ROBLOX app.

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