The Future of Groups in ROBLOX

By Navin Lal - July 21, 2012

ROBLOX introduced groups in 2009, and, today, there are over 600,000 users in groups. While our community already uses them to organize, communicate, and battle, there are improvements we’d like to make and features we’d like to implement. At RGC 2012, Software Engineer Navin Lal premiered some of our ideas.

Groups are one of the features on ROBLOX that continue to garner interest and support from our users. Today, I’ll be outlining some of the plans we have for ROBLOX groups. We are, indeed, actively working on many of these features, while others are just ideas, so please feel free to leave any feedback in the comments section. We do not yet have any definitive release dates for the changes outlined in this article.

The Games That Paved the Way for User-Generated Gaming

By Alan Fackler - July 7, 2012

Here at ROBLOX, one of our goals is to make your world-building experience easy, flexible and fun. We’ve got teams of developers working tirelessly to ensure that creating and sharing games is a seamless experience, and that the tools you need are both user-friendly and deep.

And though ROBLOX users now create millions of games per year, we can’t take credit for inventing user-generated gaming. User-generated content has existed in the realm of video games for decades, though only a small fraction of gamers had the technical know-how to truly embrace the idea.

Still, we think the games that encouraged user-generated content instilled key values that inspired us to become who we are today. So we thought we’d take a fond look back at some of those ground-breaking games, and share them with you. Enjoy.

Emergence in ROBLOX: Hard to Define, Easy to See

By Andrew Haak - April 28, 2012

In gaming, emergence happens when players use a game’s basic systems in a way that is unexpected, unpredicted and unique. It’s built into the entire ROBLOX platform; users have the freedom to create almost any type of game, experience games, moments and physics that rarely – if ever – play out the same way twice, and even discover emergence in ROBLOX’s social space and virtual economy.

Base Wars’ Level Design, from Concept to Completion

By Andrew Haak - April 13, 2012

We’ve introduced you to ROBLOX Base Wars version 1.0 and explained how Luke Weber created its highly responsive weapons using raycasting techniques. Now, we’re rounding out the trio of Base Wars development stories with a look at the game’s level design.

Loosely inspired by a classic Counter-Strike level (de_Dust2, to be specific), Base Wars’ map is designed to give each team a fair chance to take control of any of the three capture points. That’s not to say it’s perfectly symmetrical; for instance, the blue team’s base is further from the capture points, but they have the advantage of elevation – particularly conducive to the game’s Sniper class. Each capture point is located in a small, open arena, where combat is almost guaranteed, and connected by narrow, winding paths.

ROBLOX Base Wars’ Low-lag Weapon Design

By Andrew Haak - April 4, 2012

Last week, ROBLOX introduced version 1.0 of Base Wars FPS. As promised in the post, Luke Weber is spilling the beans on how he achieved its fast-paced, first-person-shooter feel using raycasting techniques and a couple crafty scripts.

How We Built an FPS in ROBLOX

By Andrew Haak - March 28, 2012

The ROBLOX Content Team is wrapping up version 1.0 of ROBLOX Base Wars, a competitive first-person shooter (FPS).

The concept is familiar: up to 30 players join a game, and each player is randomly assigned to a team. Players contribute to their team’s score by taking out opponents and capturing control points. It’s a little like Team Fortress 2, but without the hats. We created Base Wars to show that an exciting first-person experience is possible in ROBLOX, as well as to give ROBLOX builders a resource they can draw upon for their own FPS creations. The source code for ROBLOX Base Wars is free, so download – or play – the most recent version here.

ROBLOX: Built for Cross-Platform Play

By John Shedletsky - March 16, 2012

Last weekend, a friend and I set aside a day to delve into the trenches of Civilization V’s multiplayer mode. She purchased her Mac copy via Steam, slogged through the two-gigabyte download and fired it up – only to find out it isn’t compatible with Mac OSX 10.5. Making matters worse, our plans were destined to fail, as Aspyr’s Mac port doesn’t allow Mac and PC players to join the same online game.

Game development is littered with these sorts of porting blunders, but my experience with Civilization V got me thinking about how we approach compatibility at ROBLOX. Our engineers are committed to building ROBLOX in such a way that works well on many platforms, including Macs (and soon, mobile iOS devices).