As you may recall, part of the reason the Games Team created Space Knights was to experience firsthand the process of developing a top-quality game and illustrate the possibilities of ROBLOX game development. With that in mind, we took note when Unclear–known primarily for building environments with enough scale to stress even high-end hardware–launched Crystal Raider, a game that felt curiously similar to Space Knights. Turns out, it wasn’t just a coincidence.
If you’ve ever been high in the atmosphere on a plane or nearly touched the clouds in a sky-scraper, you might have found yourself pondering the idea–no, not acting on it–of jumping out and experiencing flight. You’re not the only one. We humans have dreamed of flight for generations, and have done everything from jumping out of planes to inventing rockets to experience the feeling. That’s a big reason why Air Physics, Skydiving and Flight by treyreynolds initially caught my eye (and the eyes of more than 200,000 other visitors, I should mention). In any other ROBLOX game, falling from great heights feels approximately the same. Treyreynolds wanted to change all that, so he scripted a complex air-physics script to do it. When I started to dig into what else treyreynolds has been doing around ROBLOX, I found some innovative stuff.
In Air Physics, Skydiving and Flight, you free fall through wide-open air with full control of your body on the way down. Standard movement controls apply, though hitting “w” to move “forward” during a free fall means you will fall faster (which is reflected visually by your body becoming much more rigid) and “s” will slow your fall (reflected by a sort of spread eagle position you’ve probably seen in skydiving videos). It’s a neat trick to be sure–I talked with treyreynolds about developing the system.
Continue reading We want as many people as possible to jump into ROBLOX Studio, build anything they can imagine, and contribute to our ecosystem of user-generated games. We realize it’s a complex application, and we’ve been talking for a while about refreshing our instructional Studio tutorials. We’re pleased to announce that we’ve released four videos on our YouTube channel that will help you with the basics, from low-level building tools to scripting! Here they are:
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Now that all three BLOXcons have wrapped (and we’re hard at work creating our Virtual BLOXcon for September, in case you were wondering), we thought we’d take some time to talk with two top Hackathon performers (NickPatella and Ethancomputermad) to seek out tips for future participants. Their insight can help you get a better understanding of the type of skills it takes to win such a difficult and competitive building and scripting challenge.
To clarify, the ROBLOX Hackathon is a series of building and scripting challenges, where each participant is given something to create, and a time frame to create it. The builder must complete their creation (whether that’s a gun with a reloadable clip, a pig that oinks, or a bubble machine) before time runs out, or get as far along as possible. By the end, our panel of ROBLOX engineers scores each creation based on ingenuity, beauty, and functionality. There are a lot of types of contests we could run at BLOXcon, but the Hackathon blends many of our fundamental ideals, including the spirit and passion of creation and the rush of friendly competition.
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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.
Is your ROBLOX level running slowly? ROBLOX Studio has tools to help you figure out why. Check out these three views in the “View” menu: “Script Performance”, “Task Scheduler” and “Diagnostics”. When your level is running (e.g., when you’re doing a Test > Solo visit), these panels are full of useful and telling stats about ROBLOX’s internal operations.
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Hey guys, I’m TheGamer101. You might recognize me as the creator of several popular ROBLOX games, including Sword Fighting Tournament, Ultimate Assassin’s Creed, and King of the Hill (the latter of which is the subject of this article). I’m here to share my personal development process for a complex map generation script that automatically builds a new map with every round of King of the Hill. Creating this was a real learning experience, and hopefully you’ll be able to pick up a few ideas I present and use them in your own unique development strategies.
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In late February, Code.org published a video, in which several tech-industry luminaries – from Bill Gates and Gabe Newell to Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey – extol the values of being able to write code. While the video has an underlying goal of increasing the prevalence of programming classes in schools (Code.org claims that nine out of 10 schools do not offer them), it conveys a bigger message: anyone can learn to code and anyone can position themselves to be a successful engineer. And they can start today – even if their school doesn’t have a formal computer science program.
