Every month, we release a new set of exclusive virtual goods you can only obtain by redeeming ROBLOX cards from particular retailers around the world. That means when you’re turning your prized red slice of ROBLOXia into a Builders Club subscription or Robux, you’re snagging yourself a stylish virtual good at no extra cost. This month, we’ve got a variety pack of options, with an emphasis on headphones. Because when you’re out and about in the summer sun, you just have to have the appropriate soundtrack.

Oh, and did I mention there’s a new Periastron in the mix?

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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: dynamic lighting illuminates ROBLOX Mobile, player engagement at popular games, paid game access beta, TheGamer101‘s random map generation script, a BLOXcon update and teaser, a Spotlight on a ROBLOXian truck aficionado, Notre-Dame De Paris and Broken Bones, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

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Seven-day Blog Recap

Dynamic lighting in the palms of your hands

As promised, we recently delivered dynamic lighting to ROBLOX Mobile. In this story, we take a behind-the-scenes look at all the technical hurdles — from shading to CPU architecture — our Rendering Team had to overcome to make the beloved feature work well on hardware-constrained mobile devices. To all you mobile ROBLOX players, enjoy having the power of dynamic lighting in the palms of your hands!

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You’ve probably noticed by now that the lights are on in ROBLOX Mobile. As with many significant rendering updates, getting dynamic lighting to illuminate iPhone and iPad screens was a tricky endeavor that brought our engineers face to face with some very specific technical hurdles. We got the chance to sit down with Graphics and Rendering Specialist Arseny Kapoulkine to get the scoop on porting dynamic lighting to mobile devices.

Shaders

To understand how we pulled this off, let’s start simple. Computers that can support dynamic lighting (about 97% of the computers running ROBLOX) are able to do so by utilizing shaders built into their graphics card. So our first question was, “will we be able to utilize the graphics technology bundled into iPhones and iPads to utilize shaders?” Lucky for us, iPads and iPhones 4 and higher have shader support baked in.

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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: ROBLOXians get thumbs (sort of), the making of Dungeon Delver, a city-building Crossfire, our readership survey, new BLOXcon details, a Mid-Summer Night’s Sale, Inverted Dreams and Designs, Checkpoint Racing 4.0, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

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Seven-day Blog Recap

Thumbs up/thumbs down: making waves

While features like dynamic lighting have an obvious sweeping impact on ROBLOX building and gameplay, even seemingly subtle web features have the potential to drastically improve your experience. A good example of a powerful web feature is the recently released thumbs up/thumbs down rating system, which gives every ROBLOX player the power to rate the games they play and help form a community-generated opinion. The end result is it’s easier to determine whether a game is quality — and lives up to its own hype — before you spend time trying it for yourself.

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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: a video tutorial for adding an in-game store to your place, a new Top Grossing sort for the Games page, a builder who’s finding success with our in-game purchasing feature, five answers to a million-dollar question, a preview of the 2013 BLOXY Awards, our latest Feedback Loop article, Dungeon Delver and Formula 1 racing, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

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Seven-day blog recap

How to add a store to your place

Over the last couple weeks, we’ve been talking regularly about our in-game purchasing API and trying to make it easy for you to implement an in-game store. To that end, we put together a tutorial video that walks you through the steps of building out an in-game store using our recent ROBLOX Studio plugin. If you’re interested in turning a profit off your ROBLOX creation, this is certainly a worthwhile venture. Especially when you consider we just launched…

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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: a STEM field trip to Behind the BLOX, a showcase of incredible ROBLOX builds, a simple GUI for creating an in-game store, scaling our thumbnail database, the winners of the BLOXcon Poster Contest, a plethora of new shades, Ready, Steady, Build!, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

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Seven-day Blog Recap

Local STEM group field trips to Behind the BLOX

Many educators recognize the educational value of ROBLOX. It’s a vehicle for learning to manipulate digital objects in 3D, develop a programming foundation and learn some economics basics within the context of pure fun. We recently had a group of students from a local middle school’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Coalition) program stop in our office for a weekly Behind the BLOX session, where they had the opportunity to provide feedback and play test a project that’s currently in development. You can read about their visit and get some insight as to why this STEM group uses ROBLOX as a hybrid of fun and learning.

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Every month, we release a new set of gear and hats you can only obtain by redeeming ROBLOX cards from particular retailers around the world. That means when you’re turning your prized red slice of ROBLOXia into a Builders Club subscription or Robux, you’re snagging yourself a stylish virtual good at no extra cost. With summer just around the corner, our latest round of hats lets you prepare for fun in the hot ROBLOXian sun. No, we’re not talking about virtual sunscreen; this is the hippest of eye protection.

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