Roblox Developers’ Journal

The illustrious (and infamous!) clockwork has returned! Clockwork was one of our summer interns last year and we didn’t scar him too badly, so he decided to come back for more. We’ll be getting a couple more interns over the next couple of weeks. We’re going to put them to work cranking out great stuff for you guys, and giving me rides around the office in my wheely chair. So you guys do your part and give them all a warm welcome, and I’ll do my part and make sure the wheels on my chair are oiled up.

Clockwork runs ROBLOX HQ, a website chock-full of ROBLOXy goodness. He’s an accomplished 3D modeler and programmer. He starts school at Stanford this September.

- Telamon

The contest is going great! Tons of people (well, a lot of people) have already posted their movies on YouTube. The contest Closes Monday June 9 at 6pm Pacific time (9pm Eastern). All videos must be posted by then but there’s plenty of time.

These are some of the videos that have been entered. No winners have been chosen yet!

You can check out the current entries by doing this search yourself! Click here!

There is a lot of funny stuff on there. You guys are doing great! The exclusive hat prize for this contest is the Security Camera. It will not be for sale… ever!

Want to know how to enter? Please check out the rules on the previous post.

-ReeseMcBlox

We’re having a YouTube movie contest and the theme is humor. Be sure to read all the guidelines below to make sure your funny YouTube movie gets entered.

Prizes!

There will be 5 (and only 5) winners for this event. They each will receive the Video Contest exclusive hat. They will also receive $R 300. There is no ranking among the five. All of them are winners.

Rules

1. Create a humorous ROBLOX video. You can learn how to make Roblox movies from our tutorial.

2. Please make all videos suitable for viewing by kids, grandmas, school teachers, and your next door neighbor. No profanity or inappropriate images. Any video that breaks the standard ROBLOX rules will not be able to win.

3. Videos should be between 30 seconds and 3 minutes long. Most of the footage should be ROBLOX related.

4. On your video page put the following information.

• 1. Username
• 2. Link to ROBLOX - http://www.roblox.com
• 3. Tags - “ROBLOX” and “may-funny”

5. Contest Closes Monday June 9 at 6pm Pacific time (9pm Eastern). All videos must be posted by this time.

7. Winners and prizes will be announced within a week of the contest close.

How To Win

The winners will be chosen by the ROBLOX Team who will search for videos with all the right things. Videos must have been uploaded since the contest started (no old videos!), must have the right links and tags, must have your username.

Most of all they must be funny! The ROBLOX Team will watch the highest rated and watched videos and pick the ones they think are most funny. This contest is subjective to the Team’s humor. Not everyone will agree that your video is funny, but we hope it is too!

Extra Rules:

Feel free to talk about your video on the forums and link to it. Don’t post more than once though!

Google videos will not be accepted. Only videos on YouTube will count for this event.

You can work in teams OF UP TO 3 PEOPLE. Each person in a winning team would get the hat, but the money would be split between you. All the team’s names must be listed on the YouTube video information.

If this contest goes well we may have more of them in the future. We think it’s great how many videos there are about ROBLOX. You guys are so creative!

-ReeseMcBlox

We received almost 4600 responses to the Getting To Know You survey. That’s great! Now we will be better able to understand the users. Thanks guys!

We learned some interesting things from the survey, like that most users really like chatting and playing games but not so much scripting. We will try to keep it all in mind for future updates.

We also got some great suggestions…

I would love for ROBLOX to add an options menu… for example: when you talk you can change font color, there is chat above your head when you talk, you can change the quality from high to med/low, and you can do many other option things…

You can record videos on ROBLOX when you play. I mean it would come with a built in camera!!!!

Capes for our characters!

That players could rate a place, so other people could not get fooled by the name of the place.

When in a building game, make it be able so only you can delete your stuff, so people can’t come and delete it.

Some kind of hat, shirt, T-shirt, pants gifting system. Reason: to be nice to friends. I think to make it really friendly, it should be free and not just a BC thing.

Scripts in the Catalog for easier scripting.

I believe Roblox should add new kinds of basic meshes (e.g. Wedge) and new kinds of block shapes (e.g. Cylinder) and the ability to rotate and tilt bricks.

…as well as many suggestions for various hats, faces, and other costume changes.

The following 50 users received $R 50 each. They were randomly chosen from the list of survey takers.

-ReeseMcBlox

A new release is upon us. Its theme: more fun, less frustration. Building and playing in ROBLOX should always be easy and fun. We’re constantly working hard to make sure it is. Here’re a few things we’ve focused on lately:

Decals

If you’ve ever tried to add custom graphical elements to your models and places, you know what an exercise in frustration it can be. When you add a Decal to a block, it only shows up when visiting a Place solo. If you add a lot of Decals, your Place becomes too large to save to ROBLOX. Clever builders figured out ways around this (they always do), but it required creating T-Shirts, cutting/pasting, finding and changing texture properties, deleting unnecessary T-Shirts, etc. In short, it was painful.

NO MORE!

Today’s release adds support for user-uploadable Decals that behave well in online multiplayer games. They’re simple to create and easy to use.

To create a Decal, use the Decal Builder. It works just like the builder for T-Shirts, Shirts, and Pants. Just browse to the image you want to use and upload it. ROBLOX will create a Decal and add it to your stuff. You can find the Decal Builder by clicking the “Create” button while on the Decals tab of your stuff. You can also browse for Decals created by other users in the Catalog.

To add a Decal to a Place or Model, open the Insert menu in ROBLOX Studio, choose My Decals or Free Decals, then click the Decal you wish to apply. You can drag the Decal onto any surface and click to drop it there.

Piece of cake!

Less Lag

Who likes lag? Not us. This release brings a big performance breakthrough for games with large numbers of players. Go try out your favorite Places and see if you notice the difference.

Reliability

It’s no fun when you’re locked in intense battle with several of your friends, you’re on the verge of scoring the winning shot, and suddenly your game crashes. Or worse, the server crashes. That bugs us, too, so we’ve devoted a lot of time and energy this release to making the ROBLOX game more reliable.

Of course, as with any release we’ve addressed a number of minor bugs and other inconveniences. Many of these are brought to our attention by your reports, so keep sending them our way.

Enjoy!

Matt