Roblox Developers’ Journal

By popular request we’re having a building contest! Hooray!

What we would like to see for this contest are just tons and tons of
wood-based places. We want you to use the new wood textured brick
surface. To affect the look of your bricks:

In ROBLOX Studio, you can use the properties browser to select “Wood” as the material for any part.

And that’s how you make Wood bricks!

Ideas for how to use wood include changing the look of floors, walls,
roofs, furniture, and even vehicles like ships. We have seen some
clever wooden people places. You aren’t limited to how wood works in the
real world.

Worlds of Wood Building Contest Details

Phase 1: You have from now until Monday April 6th at 9am to build and
perfect your wood based place. You enter the contest by putting the
word "worldsofwood" in your place name.

The wood items in your place should be clearly obvious. It doesn’t have to be 100% wood, but the wood should look awesome and be a part of the theme.

An example place name might be:

worldsofwood Rodeo with Wood Stadium and Barrels!!

Be sure to backup your current place before you start working, so you
can find it again after the contest. More about backing up and getting
old places back is here.

Phase 2: From Monday April 6 - Monday April 13 we will be counting
visits to all the places that are entered. Only the visits for those days (4/6 - 4/13) will count towards winning. That is the time to get people to visit your awesome wood place! We’ll know how many visits were gathered by looking in our database.

Phase 3: On Monday April 13 we will look in our database to see who
got the most visits to their Worlds of Wood place between 4/6 and 4/13. The prizes and parade will be published by Thursday April 16.

Shiny Prizes!

Actually I don’t know yet if they are shiny. I am sure they will be
awesome though! 

Entry Prize - Everyone who makes the place with "worldsofwood", AND
has wood in their place, will get the entry prize. We will know if you have wood parts from our database.

Top 100 Prize - The top 100 Worlds of Wood places by visits will get the Entry and a cooler prize.

Top 10 Prize - The top 10 Worlds of Wood places by visits will get the Entry prize, the Top 100 Prize, the Top 10 Prize,  and be featured in a
parade on the News.

Q & A

Q: Can I make more than one contest entry on my fancy Builders Club account?
A: No, only one entry place per account. You can make more wood places, just have only one with the ‘worldsofwood" title.

Q: Can I enter if I am in SuperSafe Privacy protection? I can’t rename my place. :(
A: Ask your parent to turn the SuperSafe Privacy setting off long enough for you to change the name of your place to include the word "worldsofwood". When the contest is over you can ask them to help you change it back.

Q: Can I buy ads to get people to visit my place?
A: Yes, but you should only do that between 4/6 - 4/12 or you will be wasting your Tix.

Q: Can we work in teams?
A: No, it’s every ROBLOXIAN for themselves. You can get your friends to help you but only the place owner will get the prizes.

 
Okay, go get started building! You can talk about this contest more on
our forums!

-ReeseMcBlox

ROBLOX’s Free Stuff mini-event is winding down. Up until now we have been offering up minor gifts to the community for free. There were items that, for the most part, ROBLOX veterans had long ago acquired.

Now we are offering up something special that no one has: a Mysterious Purple Box! It’s only going to be available for a short time, so don’t wait. Go get one! It’s free!

“What’s the deal with this purple box?!” you might ask. At some future date the box will turn into a unique item that will never be offered again. The only way to get it is to own the purple box. But, hey, if you don’t want a free unique item, that’s your business. Maybe you don’t need a mysterious purple box to be content. Weird.

New Faces

Concerned – Do you wish people would take you more seriously? Want a face to wear for when you are making disdainful posts in General Discussion? You guys know who you are.

Mischievous – For the little trickster in all of us :-)

Meanie – There aren’t supposed to be very many mean people on ROBLOX, which is why this face costs 5000 R$! Still… I think it looks pretty awesome. Hide your Meanie face behind a Black Knight Helm, then, when battle gets heavy, let your foes know you mean business by taking off your helmet to reveal… you are really really mean! RAWR!

Aghast – Yikes! This face makes you look constantly surprised. It’s actually pretty funny when you think about it.

New Hats

Unicorn Horn – Prance around in style with this Unicorn Horn. Not sure why it’s purple…

Silverthorn Antlers – Did you miss out on getting the Wanwood Antlers more than a year ago? Well, antlers are back in style. These things look wicked in-game. Careful, they’re really really really pointy. Works great with almost all head shapes.

Black Paintball Mask – Never play Miked’s Ultimate Paintball unprotected again! You wouldn’t play paintball without a mask in real life, would you? In the future there will red and blue versions of this hat – so you’ll be able to show your allegiance. Red? Blue? It’s up to you!

Buxsplosion – BOOM! Money everywhere! Who doesn’t need a vortex of cash?

Muffin Cat: King of Muffins – This week’s collectible user-created book was written by 4muskateers. It has a fat cat on the cover, which people on the internets seem to like. It’s also sparkly. Ooooo sparkles…

- Telamon

Q: What is better than some free stuff?

A: More free stuff!

Due to overwhelming positive responses from yesterday, we are extending our “Thank the Community” mini-event. For a limited time only, we’ve got some free faces for you guys. Make sure to load up fast, because we can’t give free faces away forever!

For all you old-timers out there who have had all the free stuff we’ve given out so far, make sure you check back later in the week. We’re going to have something special for you guys :-)

- Telamon

My theory? Everyone!

The ROBLOX Team would like to thank all the users who have poked their avatar’s head into the ROBLOX test site (test.roblox.com) on occasion to help us in our relentless pursuit of nasty bugs and other glitches. There has been a legion of helpful users, and it’s impossible to thank everyone individually – so we’ve got a little something for the whole community.

As a small “Thank You”, for a limited time only ROBLOX is giving away some free heads!

- Telamon

News Flash!

An earth-shattering breakthrough has been made by Robloxian scientists! The universe, previously thought to be entirely composed of shiny plastic bits, has been revealed to contain at least one other fundamental material! Excitedly gibbering scientists are calling this new substance “wood”.

One layperson we interviewed called this new development “crazy” and “completely nuts”.

Close Up

Wood is a new material that you can use to build things with. At the moment it operates in-game just like plastic. In the future we envision wood being lighter than plastic, having a higher coefficient of friction (so it won’t be as slippery as plastic"), and being less bouncy. Advanced builders won’t wait for us to do this – you can tweak the properties of wooden parts (mostly friction and elasticity) today in ROBLOX Studio.

Subliminal Sneak Peek

A small number of super-sharp Robloxians noticed that we actually gave you a sneak peek at this new material a week before it was released in a recent music video. Congrats to everyone who noticed.

Recommender

Also new in this release is the asset recommender. When you are looking at a places, hats, shirts, heads, faces, etc we now present you with a random selection of other stuff that we think you might like.

In a future release, the recommendations are going to get better. Imagine this: you like playing Miked’s Paintball. When you go to the page for that game, you’ll see recommendations for other great paintball and capture the flag games. This is all part of an on-going effort to connect great builders with a strong player base for their games.

Other Developments

The ROBLOX team has been on a warpath crushing bugs, especially ones relating to network connectivity and in-game lag. Keep sending us reports when you find a bug, we often find them very helpful.

- Telamon