Be a ROBLOX Tycoon: Earn Robux With Game Passes and Gear

By John Shedletsky - January 28, 2013

ROBLOX users often want to know how they can earn some extra Robux. Fortunately, the way our economy is structured, there is a wide range of things you can do to fatten your ROBLOX wallet. Today, we’ll be focusing on Game Passes and the Add Gear to Game feature, both of which are great places to start–especially if you’ve got a game that’s picking up traction.

How to Build a FPS in 15 Minutes with ROBLOX

By Andrew Haak - June 1, 2012

By the time the ROBLOX Content Team finished developing ROBLOX Base Wars FPS, we had accumulated a number of powerful scripts that quickly turn a standard ROBLOX game into a class-based, first-person shooter (FPS). Recognizing the power of the scripts, we packaged them in a FPS plugin for ROBLOX Studio and put them to the test.

Do they make it possible to create an FPS in 15 minutes?

Video Tutorial: Making Shirts and Pants

By Becky Lee Herndon - November 10, 2011

Check out this ROBLOX Tutorial: Making Shirts and Pants! This tutorial guides you through making shirts and pants for ROBLOX characters. Making clothes and selling them is a Builders Club premium feature.

A lot of the principles in this video also apply to making T-shirts, which anyone on ROBLOX can do. You can watch other ROBLOX tutorials, as well as game reviews and interviews, on our YouTube Channel.

-ReeseMcBlox

Tune in to ROBLOX

By Becky Lee Herndon - October 21, 2011

Join millions of other viewers who are checking out our ROBLOX Channel, where you can find…

Tutorials
Game reviews
TV News segments
ROBLOX commercials
Interviews with staff
and more videos being added all the time!

Here are two playlists you can watch right now to get you started.

Tutorials
Help for various fun and creative challenges on ROBLOX, including basic scripting and publishing a model.

Game Reviews
Our staff review their favorite ROBLOX games.

We’ll be adding more videos to the playlists, and to our channel, every week. Be sure to subscribe so you get notified about each video update!

-ReeseMcBlox

ROBLOX Plugins: Power to Scripters

By John Shedletsky - August 12, 2011

Last night, ROBLOX released an exciting new feature for scripters… My friends, we offer you nothing less than total control of your ROBLOX building experience!

It’s my pleasure to introduce the ROBLOX plugin architecture: it allows scripters, in Lua, to write their own building tools. These tools will appear in a series of toolbars in ROBLOX Studio, like this:

The best community-developed tools may be rolled back into future versions of ROBLOX Studio, and they can be shared between players.

How to Install a Plugin

Currently, one plugin ships standard with ROBLOX, the Time Of Day plugin produced by ROBLOX super-intern Cyrion. Here are two other plugins for you to experiment with:

Demo Plugin – This is one of the simplest plugins possible. Take a look at the source to see how to make your own.

Tree Generator – I repurposed the procedural tree generator from one of Anaminus’s places and made his code into a plugin in less than 5 minutes.

To install these plugins, follow these steps:

Download the files
Unzip them
Open ROBLOX Studio
Tools –> Open Plugin Folder
Copy the treegen and demo folders into this folder
These tools will be loaded next time you open a place in Studio

If you ever want to remove a plugin, just delete the plugin’s folder. In the future, we would like to make installing plugins easier. For now it’s a power-user feature.

How to Make a Plugin

Flurite and Trappingnoobs have written an article in the wiki outlining what you need to know to produce your own plugins. We will be updating this article as we continue to improve our plugin architecture.

What Can I Do With This

Most of the official ROBLOX tools are also built in Lua, so really, you can do anything you want! The basic idea is you can make a tool to do anything that’s hard to do in ROBLOX Studio right now. I thought about it for 30 seconds and I already have more ideas than will fit:

CFraming tools for putting parts inside each other
More tree-generation tools with more parameters
Weather tool
Character designer – dressing NPCs in ROBLOX Studio is very hard right now
NPC dialog creator – a nice interface for creating dialogs
Team configurator – create teams, and create rules for them (red gets weapons X, Y, Z & blue gets only Z)
Regenerator – click on a model to make it regen every X seconds.
Teleport creator – type in a destination and click.
Moving platform designer – draw a path for a floating platform to follow
AI platform for Bots – create bots and tell them what to do
NavMesh generator – draw paths and nodes in levels to create a NavMesh that AI bots can use A* to navigate.
Random treasure placer – click on a spot to create 5-25 coins and 1-3 gems there.
Head explosion from ideas!

I Made and Awesome Plugin!

Great! Share it with us on the Scripters forum – we’re very interested to see what kinds of tools you build for ROBLOX Studio!

- 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

Data: Only the Most Valuable Thing in the World

By John Shedletsky - April 14, 2011

The ROBLOX data centers are about to get toasty – today we’re releasing our data persistence API to ROBLOX game developers!

Data persistence will allow place builders to save information about players in their games (and load it when those players come back).

Things you can do with the new API:

Create an RPG game that saves a player’s Gold and current Level
Spawn returning players in the exact location they were standing in when they last exited your game
Create a building game where structures that players create are saved and loaded when they come back
Create a game where players design their own race cars – and have those cars waiting for them when they come back
Create a checkpoint system for an obstacle course that will allow players to save their progress
A bunch of stuff we haven’t even thought of

I want to try this out!

There are two places on ROBLOX where you can see the data persistence API in action right now.

The “Welcome to ROBLOX Building” level, where we are using persistence to help us make an exciting multiplayer building game.
“Cow Clicker”, a quick and dirty demo that shows how to build a simple game using persistence with about than 80 lines of Lua.

Information for Scripters

Use of this new API is intended for advanced Lua scripters only – if you’re just starting out learning how to script, we don’t recommend you jump into the persistence API. Advanced scripters can find documentation of the API in the wiki. We will be curating this documentation over the next couple of weeks – as well as providing additional tutorials.

This is a highly experimental feature, subject to change. We’ll be collecting feedback from the community to determine what other functionality we need to provide to give place builders a solid yet flexible method of saving data.

- Telamon