All World Wonder Building Contest prizes have been ordered - they should ship in the next couple of days. If anyone is curious to see their shirt and just can’t wait, you can check them out here.
Thanks to everyone who participated!
- Telamon
Major new features
Super Safe Chat
A lot of parents are uneasy about letting their kids play on the internet unsupervised. Online chat is a big issue - while we can and do filter chat for profanity, and respond to all user reports of inappropriate chat, there is no way to filter all offensive chat as it is occurring. The problem is one of filtering intent. In order to completely lock down our chat system to make something that we think is totally safe for young kids, we have introduced a templated chat system loaded with pre-approved messages. Players with SuperSafe chat mode on will only be able to hear messages sent from other players using the templated chat menu.
Under 13 Mode
Coupled with Super Safe Chat, Under 13 Mode lets parents truly make Roblox safe for kids aged 4-124 (our avowed mission statement). When a user is operating in Under 13 mode, we gaurantee that they will only see uploaded images that have been already approved by moderators.
COPPA Compliance
Roblox, the site and the game are now 100% COPPA compliant. Interested parents can read about what we do to protect children on our site.
Skyboxes and Time of Day
If you check out Crossroads, you will see the new Skybox and Time of Day features that we have added to the game. Custom skyboxes are still rough around the edges, but we will have them be insertable from the Toolbox in the next release.
LÂ = game:service(”Lighting”)
while true do
—– increment the time of day and then wait for a while
L:SetMinutesAfterMidnight(L:GetMinutesAfterMidnight()+1)
wait(1)
end
Until then, if you put the above script in your level, you will at least get some nice time of day effects, including stars, sunrise and sunset.
Image and Forum Moderator Badges
We have added two badges that grant admin-like powers in the forum and in our image moderation queue. These badges will be occassionally offered to longtime users with sterling community service records on Roblox, as we need more volunteers. They are offered by invitation only, so don’t bother asking. Our first deputies are MrDoomBringer and FFJosh.
FireFox / Mozilla Support
Thanks to Matt’s efforts, the website now looks a lot better in FireFox and other Mozilla browsers. FireFox users have no way to launch the game from within the browser - they will need to select “Play Roblox” from their Start menu to get in-game. But it’s a start.
Fancy New Badges Page
As we get more badges in the system, we’ll be adding more tabs.
Improved Profile Editting
The profile edit page now looks better and has some additional options.
- Telamon
WWC Contest Winners
1. WWCFox1 with 871 visits to his wonder, Statue of Zeus at Olympia
2. WWCBuilder with 830 visits to his wonder, Samurai Fortress
3. WWCPyramids with 598 visits to his wonder, The Great Pyramid of Robloxia
4. WWCAre92 with 496 visits to his wonder, Wonder of the World Pyramid
These players will get a message from me shortly with information on how to collect their prize. If for any reason they or their parents don’t want strange people on the Internet mailing them clothing, we will begin to walk down the list until we have given out 4 Roblox WWC T-Shirts (highly collectible, expect to see them selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars).
Once the T-Shirts have been designed, I’ll post images of them here.
Here are the final standings:
- Telamon
The World Wonder Contest ended last night at midnight, Pacific Standard Time. We are tallying the results and doing some database audits to make sure everything is on the up and up, then we will release the standings. Only visits that happened before the contest end date will count.
Unless something really bad happens, I’ll post the results by tomorrow.
Congratulations to all the participants. More than 50 people entered the contest and there are a lot of high-quality places out there. You can check out all the entries by going to the Browse page and searching for all Places with WWC in their title.
- Telamon
Builderman and I spent today hanging out at the Nueva School’s science fair, where we had a room set aside to do Roblox user testing. We had about 60 kids total play around in a clone of the Community Building room over the course of 4 hours. The three biggest problems users encounted?
1. Characters getting stuck on things.
2. Camera/Character control is hard to learn.
3. Lots of lost connections when using flakey wireless (can we do better?)
I also came up with a theory of what might be causing the insidious join bug - if you are browsing an out-of-date copy of the User Games page and you try to join a game that no longer exists, Bad Things might happen (like the blue sky bug). This issues have been moved to the top of the Fix It list. Thanks to everyone who helped us to uncover them!
- Telamon
