Announcing the First Ever Rich Tester Day

By John Shedletsky - September 22, 2011

ROBLOX is a game built by its players. Players help us test the game too – on our test sites such as gametest.roblox.com and sitetest.roblox.com. Many of the bugs our early testers find are fixed prior to release, so most ROBLOXians don’t even know they existed.

ROBLOX is launching a new test site that will allow us to handle 10x the number of testers as we have been able to accommodate before. To celebrate this launch, we are announcing the first ever Rich Tester Day!

What is Rich Tester Day?

Rich Tester Day is a zany event for our dedicated testers! We want to see if we can make the new test site explode by overloading it with users, so we are giving out free money (money only good on test site)! Everyone who visits our new test site between 9/22/2011 12:00 PM and 9/22/2011 5:00 PM PST will find 10,000 ROBUX in their test account! Users who create a new account on our test site will start with 50,000 tickets.

Testing Money is Not Real Money

There is no way to transfer money from our new test site to your account on ROBLOX.com. Also, data on our test sites can be overwritten at any time without warning – so enjoy your testing money while it lasts!

One Lucky User

One lucky user who logs onto our new test site will get 10,000 real ROBUX on ROBLOX.com. All you have to do is login to our new test site and you have a chance to win.

Reporting Bugs

If you find any bugs with the new test site (especially bugs that don’t happen on regular ROBLOX), please post them in this special forum. These bug reports help us to deliver a top-quality game to our millions of players. Thanks!

- Telamon

The Terrain Game

By John Shedletsky - August 26, 2011

Hail ROBLOXians! Today has been an exciting week at ROBLOX HQ. The new terrain feature is 98% done; we did our first public test of terrain on gametest.roblox.com yesterday.

What is terrain? I could tell you, but maybe you’d rather hear from the developers themselves. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce Simon Kozlov (aka Gemlocker) and Ben Deckinga (bjdeck), direct from the ROBLOX RALLY:

Key points about ROBLOX terrain:

Live on gametest.roblox.com (not up 100% of the time)
Vast voxel-based grid of boxes and wedges
Integrated with the ROBLOX physics engine
Destructible
It is fully scriptable in Lua (but API will change before release)
Editable with ROBLOX and user-made Studio plugins
First version out in September
Additional terrain types out soon after

We’ve got some other huge user features coming down the pike for September release as well, but we’ll talk about those another time…

- Telamon

Introducing MEGA Places

By John Shedletsky - August 11, 2011

First announced at the ROBLOX RALLY, MEGA places have gone live on ROBLOX.com!

What is a MEGA Place?

MEGA places support a lot more simultaneous players than classical ROBLOX places do. They are still highly experimental. We have done tests of MEGA places with up to 100 players, but for this first release MEGA places will support 30 players.

MEGA Place Facts

MEGA places currently support 30 players per instance.
This number will increase over time.
MEGA places get roughly 2-3x the compute power per game – so they can handle more moving parts, scripts, and players without lagging.
All players can play MEGA places
Creating a MEGA place is a BC Beta feature – something we are testing at the moment with our Builders Club members. This is largely because the beefier computers we use to host MEGA places have higher cost for ROBLOX Corp.

How to Make a Mega Place

It is now possible to control the number of players that your place supports from the Place Configuration page. Classic places can have between 6-20 players each. MEGA places get what ever the current MEGA place player limit is (always at least 30, but in the future it could be 50 or 100).

The Future

The ROBLOX Team, especially RoboYZ, is continuing to optimize both our server and client code to support more players in MEGA places. Here’s a sneak peek at what is coming…

Go try a MEGA place right now!

- Telamon

Teleportation: The Art & The Science

By John Shedletsky - July 22, 2011

It has been a long journey, people. A long journey.

In the beginning, there was no notion of space (or spaces) in ROBLOX. When I joined the company in June 2006, the only playable place there was was Crossroads. Then we allowed the users to host their own multiplayer instances: independent worlds of their own design; shards of a larger reality. This momentous decision lead to the creation of universe that is, in a very real way, infinite. New games are being uploaded to ROBLOX.com faster than you can load them. You will never see them all.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, Teleportation: an ethereal link between two distant locales, ignorant of the base substrate of the ROBLOX website. The fractured infinity of the ROBLOX universe will be made whole again. The space between our worlds has been annihilated.

Teleportation for Beginners

First, grab a copy of the Teleporter model.
This will make it appear in the “My Models” section of the Insert Panel in ROBLOX Studio
Insert a teleporter wherever you want in your level
By default, this teleporter goes nowhere. You need to configure it so it knows where to send people! See directions for this step below…
Congratulations! You have a teleporter that will send people from level A to level B.
For best results, place a second teleporter in level B that allows your players to return to level A. Without bidirectional teleporters, ROBLOXians can easily get lost!

Configuring the Teleporters

There are three settings inside the teleporter model for you to play around with. These allow you to modify the behavior of your teleporter with no scripting knowledge!

PlaceId – This is the ID of the ROBLOX place you want the teleporter to send people to. This is the only setting you must change to make it work. You can find the ID for a place in the URL for that place’s page. For instance, Crossroads is PlaceId 1818.

DestinationSpawnName – You can program your teleporter to send a player is a specific spawn location in the destination level. For instance, the teleporter pad in Crossroads has a spawnpoint in it named “CrossRoadsSpawn”. If you set PlaceId to 1818 and DestinationSpawnName to “CrossRoadsSpawn”, players traveling through your teleporter will spawn on top of the teleporter Sorcus placed in Crossroads (instead of at a random spawn point).

ThisSpawnName – This is basically the address of the teleporter. You can set this to something like “TeleporterInSecretBase” and then teleport people there from another level by using this as your DestinationSpawnName.

Teleportation for Scripters

If you are a scripter, you don’t have to use our teleporter models. You can build your own! Here are the two function calls that you can make:

game:GetService(“TeleportService”):TeleportToSpawnByName(placeId, spawnName)

game:GetService(“TeleportService”):Teleport(placeId)

Important: these calls will only work from inside a LocalScript. Take a look at the code in our teleporter to see how it’s done!

Personal Note

It has been my extreme pleasure to present this particular feature to you guys today. Back when there were only 4 of us working at ROBLOX, sometimes Dave and Erik (the guys in charge) would leave Matt and I alone for the day and we would secretly work on teleportation! I’m psyched that it is now part of ROBLOX! Have fun experimenting!

- Telamon

ROBLOX for iPhone Version 1.0!

By Becky Lee Herndon - May 26, 2011

ROBLOX for iPhone

The official ROBLOX for iPhone app is now available! You can find it on the App Store and iTunes Store from the publisher ROBLOX, Inc!

This is version 1.0 of the ROBLOX for iPhone app, which means there are a lot more features coming! Right now you can check out your own profile, see your friends list and check your messages. In the next versions we will be adding even more awesome and familiar features.

It works on iPhones and iPod Touches!

Tell us what you think about this on our forums!

-ReeseMcBlox

Let’s Give Them Something to Talk About

By John Shedletsky - November 15, 2010

This is a *very early* sneak peek at a new feature Madrak and his team are working on.

Can anyone say “scriptable dialog system”?

The Dialog boxes are drawn using our Lua GUI system, so there would be nothing stopping an enterprising scripter from inserting other graphical and functional GUI elements into the chat bubbles. You can also make non-humanoid objects talk.

Very exciting developments!

- Telamon

Builderman Ponders the Future of Social Gaming

By Becky Lee Herndon - November 4, 2010

Mancala

Gaming has always been a social activity. Recent excavations of an ancient house in Jordan uncovered an 8,000 year old limestone Mancala board. For more information on the history of games check out some even earlier Hunter / Gatherer games.

There is nothing fundamentally "new" about the trend today in online social networking and gaming. Prior to the PC and gaming consoles, pretty much every game you could buy at a toy store was a social game – it required "2 or more players".

monopoly

Today we are seeing computers and networks catch up with what naturally occurs in real life: Most people want to be "connected" with their friends! Not just statically, but actively communicating, playing, chatting, you name it. This is validated by the growth of social networking sites and online communities.

Where is all of this going? In the not too distant future, I believe devices will be available that provide for "continuous" connection with ones friends in real life! One example will be a pair of glasses with a heads up display that provides a continuous chat capability with your closest friends. At any time of the day you will simply point to your friend, say something (or type on a virtual keyboard), and they will receive a real-time text-to speech bubble of what you have said.

You may recognize people who are doing continuous friend communication because they will be wearing glasses that look like this:

This is what a person will look like who is using a virtual keyboard to chat with their "continuous" online friends:

Here is what these "continuously connected" people will be seeing through their glasses – the real world plus an overlay of their friends (hopefully these glasses will not be allowed in school!). Maybe this will be called FaceSpace or RobloVision!:

Will this be a good thing? Maybe not! Just as many parents limit the time their children spend in front of a screen today, I can see future parents limiting how much time their kids can spend "plugged into the grid". And we’ll really have some issues to deal with when products migrate beyond HUD glasses towards retinal displays and neural taps!

You can talk more about this post on our forums!

- David Baszucki / Builderman