It’s been a while since we told you anything new about ROBLOX Studio, but it’s a constant work in progress and a focus of our engineering core. In fact, we recently added a senior software engineer to the Studio team, dedicated a web engineer to Studio development, and are seeking to add a couple more positions. Good things are in store for those of you who build and develop using Studio.

Since the launch of Studio 2013 in February, the team has been hard at work making it a more stable and efficient product. Today, we have a much-improved “dragger” tool to preview. This update will drastically improve the speed at which you can move large groups of parts – for example, skyscrapers, houses, castles, etc. – around your ROBLOX worlds.

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Three months back, we announced our transition toward a binary file format and explained how the technology has achieved a 100x reduction in the file size of ROBLOX places and a 5-10x reduction in load/save time. We have been rolling out the new format transparently and carefully, starting with the temporary files created for “Play Solo” and “Start Server” sessions in ROBLOX Studio. This week, we finished applying the format to all of ROBLOX, including Personal Build Server saves, and local place saves, loads and uploads via ROBLOX Studio.

You can look back at our original tech article about the binary file format to understand how re-arranging data makes it work and see the results of a couple tests we ran to prove its efficacy. If you’re the anecdotal type, however, you can simply experience it for yourself by loading and saving places in ROBLOX Studio, looking at the reduction in local file sizes, and uploading content to ROBLOX.com. In general, you should notice that files are smaller and saving/loading/uploading is faster – especially when you’re working with a place built out of tens of thousands of parts.

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After mentioning the ability to select individual parts from a model in last week’s Feedback Loop, we were surprised to find how many of our builders were enthralled with, and grateful for, what we thought was a relatively minor suggestion. Alas, there are many small things you can learn that can make your building experience with Studio easier and faster. We decided to talk with Creative Director John Shedletsky and the Studio Team’s Tyler Berg to get some basic building advice. We’ll start with technical advice from John.

Change is at the core of our platform. ROBLOX Studio 2013 will be constantly updated throughout the year, often multiple times per week. There’s been a wide range of tweaks and enhancements made to Studio in the last couple of weeks–a lot in response to useful feedback we’ve gotten from our users. We’re here with Tim Brown, ROBLOX Studio Team Lead, to give you an update on what’s new.    

The ROBLOX Studio team has heard your feedback and wants to thank you for your patience.  We’ve learned a lot over the past week about how our users use our product, often in ways we didn’t expect, and we’re working to make sure that your experience is at least as good in ROBLOX Studio 2013.  We’ve been working hard over the past week to identify issues people are having with Studio 2013, prioritize them, and fix them.  We’ve made a lot of improvements so far, and have a lot more going out this week.

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One exciting thing about ROBLOX that most people don’t realize right away is it’s not a finished game — it is very much a work in progress. The upside to this is that everyone, both community members and the ROBLOX development team, has a real opportunity to shape the future of ROBLOX. The downside is that since ROBLOX is constantly evolving, it doesn’t stay the same. This can be a source of friction for veteran users who have gotten used to the status quo.

We released ROBLOX Studio 2013 several days ago. One of its key benefits is it runs on a modern, platform-independent framework, meaning we can develop and support one product across the PC and Mac. Ultimately, you will have a more consistent experience, regardless of your platform, and we’ll be able to deliver new features faster.

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ROBLOX Studio, the tool that professional builders use to create 99% of the levels on ROBLOX, just got a huge upgrade. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re thrilled to present ROBLOX Studio 2013.

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We were blown away. Not just by the sheer amount of entries we received for our ROBLOX Studio splash screen contest (over 3,000!), but by the amount of ingenuity, creativity, and talent on display in each of the entries. We had originally postulated that we’d be choosing five winners–but we just couldn’t distill that much awesome into five winning slots. So we’ve expanded our circle to include 10 winners, each of whom will receive the prize of 20,000 Robux.

We’ll also be featuring one of the 10 winning splash screens each week moving forward to give you 10 awesome weeks of custom ROBLOX Studio loading screens. After those 10 weeks are up, we’re going to show more of the entries on a regular basis in an effort to ensure that the Studio splash screen is always a design submitted by one of our users. Believe us, you guys sent more than enough to last, ahem, a few years.

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