Roblox Developers’ Journal

We put a new release of Roblox online around 2pm yesterday. After making sure everything was running fine, we went to our design meeting without telling anyone what we had done. Someone else was wondering aloud whether any user would find the “Sell a shirt” feature before we told everyone about it. I joked that when we got out of our meeting that there would be fifty user shirts for sale. It was more like 75.

Selling Shirts

Builder’s Club members can now make and sell shirts! This was the feature I was alluding to in the post about Matt’s awesome secret demo. I think this feature is really exciting for two reasons: 1) it’s another fun way to make some Robux and 2) it ensures a constant supply of new cool shirts, coming into the catalogue all the time.

This is a Builder’s Club only feature. This is not going to change. However, we will be selling Builder’s Club subscriptions soon.

How to sell a shirt:

1. Create a shirt. You can only sell shirts that you’ve made.
2. Find the shirt in your My Stuff section.
3. Click “Edit this Shirt”
4. Now you can write a nice title and description for your item. This will show up in the catalogue, so you want to write something good.
5. Check the “Sell this Item” box at the bottom of the screen.
6. Set your price. You can sell a shirt for any price you like. However, there is a 1 R$ or 10% (whichever is higher) transaction fee on each shirt you sell.
7. Your shirt will now appear in the catalogue. You can remove it from sale by going back to the shirt’s page and unchecking the “Sell this item” box.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the shirt market now that there are about 30 people who are able to sell shirts. Will prices remain high? Will everyone sell for super-cheap in order to appear higher in the “Best Selling” list? Or will all good shirts end up costing 14 R$, the price that gives the seller the largest profit percentage? Will widespread bootlegging of shirts become an issue?

Capture the Flag

Capture the Flag is here! In Capture the Flag games, two or more teams fight to inflitrate an enemy base and steal their flag. A team scores when they bring an enemy flag back to their flag stand. Beware! The flag carrier cannot use weapons while the flag is equipped, and needs to be defended!

How to make your place into a CTF level (no scripting required!):

1. Open your place in Roblox Studio.
2. Open the toolbox.
3. Goto the “Game Objects” tab of the toolbox.
4. Insert a Red and a Blue Flag Stand into your place.
5. Insert the Leaderboard script into your place.
6. Insert at least one Red and one Blue Spawn Location into your place.
7. Publish your place.
8. Yes, it is that easy.

If you want to inspect or copy a very simple CTF level, check out my sample CTF place.

RocketPropulsion Object

Erik made a great post yesterday about his new RocketPropulsion object, which will let people make lots of cool things, like heat-seeking rockets. To see a sample usage of this object, check out Erik’s Rocket Mayhem place.

IP Ban

We have implemented IP Banning in this past release. This will allow us to permanently banish problem users from Roblox. If you share a computer or an internet connection with someone else who plays Roblox, make sure that everyone using that connection is playing nice, since an IP Ban blocks specific internet connections, rather than specific user accounts.

New Builder’s Club Members

We used miked’s formula from our BC formula contest to find 20 experienced users to help us test selling shirts and any other upcoming BC features. Unlike BC accounts won in contests, which are lifetime accounts, these accounts expire in six months. When a BC account expires, you get to keep your extra places.

The lucky testers are:

pokemon97
waffleboy
Zora560
DracoSwordMaster
kokosekko
Sora867
buttlad
Sirloin
are14
fleskhjerta
dark501
ToaZuku
William
Chels
chrisd
builder
ZeroxxKoopaButtlad
laylabookheart
kokosekko2
jacbob

Website Improvements

Matt and Erik have again improved the performance of the website, so pageloads should remain snappy.

Bugfixes

We’ve made some important bug fixes in this release. In particular, you guys can thank Builderman for fixing the spawn bug.

- Telamon

There’s a new “RocketPropulsion” object in town. It works similarly to the BodyGyro and BodyPosition objects, but this one moves a part around in a manner not unlike a rocket.  For a sample of this new feature, visit my place.

Disclaimer: This is a preliminary feature and it may change in the future.  Also, this feature is for advanced users who understand a little physics.

Here are the most important members:

Target – a Part that the rocket will fly towards
Fire() – causes the rocket to fly towards Target

Other members:

Abort() – causes the rocket to fall down
MaxSpeed – the maximum speed that the rocket will travel at
CartoonFactor – A real rocket (factor=0) will point slightly upwards as it counters gravity. An ACME rocket (factor=1) favored by Wily Coyote points its nose straight at its target. CartoonFactor must lie between 0 and 1, otherwise I don’t know what will happen.
TargetRadius – A distance from the Target at which the ReachedTarget event is fired
ReachedTarget – This event is fired when the Rocket comes within TargetRadius of the target

Tuning:

MaxThrust – The maximum thrust the rocket will exert. Heavy rockets need more thrust to remain airborne and to track the target
MaxTorque – The maximum torque the rocket will use to rotate itself.
ThrustP – The P in the PD controller that governs the motion of the Rocket. The higher the number, the more aggressively the rocket will move towards the Target.
ThrustD – The D in the PD controller that governs the motion of the Rocket. Dampens the motion of the Rocket, preventing it from overshooting.
TurnP - The P in the PD controller that governs the rotation of the Rocket. The higher the number, the more aggressively the rocket will turn towards the Target.
TurnD – The D in the PD controller that governs the rotation of the Rocket. Dampens the rotation of the Rocket, preventing it from overshooting.

-Erik

Today we’ve made the switch to larger office accomodations. Once we’ve settled in, we’ll be pushing out a new release. We will also be upgrading a select few additional accounts to Builder’s Club status, as per miked’s formula, from our competition some days ago. When exactly will this happen? As soon as our new office building is complete. The contractors are working hard to finish the helipad, which will also us to celebrate future releases by taking impromptu beach trips to Half Moon Bay in Builderman’s refurbished army chopper.

- Telamon

We have another admin! His name is stoecker. He’ll be helping me do moderation and stuff like that. Since he’s an intern, he’ll have more time to spend so he’ll be ingame more often. Later, though, he’d like to help Telamon or another person to code extra features or work on the website. Say hi to him!  

- Clockwork

As a builder, nothing is more satisfying to me than to see that a place of mine has been visited hundreds of times in the past day. Building a cool place takes a lot of time and effort, but the knowledge that hundreds of people are enjoying something I’ve made makes it worth it for me. Not to mention that getting place visits is the fastest, best, and only way to accumulate a vast fortune of Robux. Just ask Stealth Pilot, who has more than 30,000 of them.

I can’t help make you the next Stealth Pilot, but I can offer a couple of tips and tricks to people looking to maximize visits to their place. I’ve listed the most important tricks first.

Take Your Best Shot

When you are looking at the Games page, how do you decide which game to play? I look at two things: the number of people playing, and how fun it looks from the picture. You can’t control the number of people playing, but you can do something about the picture. When you save your level in Roblox Studio, Roblox remembers where the camera was when you saved. It uses this camera position to render the thumbnail for your place. Some people take advantage of this trick to create really dramatic shots of their levels.

Which place would you rather visit?

Place 1:

Place 2:

MaxPlayers To the Max

Games with more people in them are more fun. Unless you have a game with a ton of moving parts or explosions, there is no reason not to raise your MaxPlayer limit to the max (currently the max is 20). By default the MaxPlayer limit is set to 8, which is low for most types of games. To change this, open your map in Roblox Studio, find the Players object in the Explorer Pane, and set its MaxPlayers property to 20. Save and publish your map.

Write a Good Description

Sometimes when I’m not sure if I want to play a map, I’ll check out the designer’s description of their place. Judging from the descriptions only, which of these places would you rather play?

Place 1:

Sail the seas in my newest map! Take command of your team’s ship, and set sail to islands in search of doubloons, or make sure the enemy is at bay! Get more doubloons, and buy more maximum health and weapons!

or…

Place 2:

hi my name is little timmy and his is my place it has dogs and cats and houses come and party with my and me friends dont ask for admin kk plz visit i need the money

Keep it Fresh

No map is going to be perfect the first time you publish it, and even the best maps get old after a while. Your players will appreciate it if you fix problems or make improvements to your map over time. Small changes can make a big difference. A week ago I made 5-minutes worth of changes to Builderman’s Roblox World HQ, basically just changing some colors and switching up the weapons. A mirror universe version of Roblox HQ was born. It has recieved 1300+ visits since then.

Put Your Best Place First

If you have multiple places, your profile page looks best if you publish your most awesome-looking place to your first slot and if you make that place your default (so it appears at the top).

- - -

These are just some things to think about. Most of these changes take very little time to do, compared to the time required to build a nice place.

- Telamon