ROBLOX’s Mobile Site, m.roblox.com, Now Live for Testing

By Toby Teel - August 24, 2012

ROBLOX is a big platform. While each of our development teams has its own areas of focus, goals and projects, there’s been an overarching objective in recent months: make ROBLOX a more mobile-friendly platform. Today, we took a step forward by launching a mobile ROBLOX website at m.roblox.com.

M.roblox.com is not yet the default landing page for mobile traffic, but it’s now available for our dedicated blog readers to try. We’re seeking your feedback regarding what works well, what could work better and what features you’d like to see in the future. You can let us know in this article’s comments or on our dedicated mobile forum; just remember to note the mobile device you’re using when feeding back.

Hack Week: Envisioning ROBLOX on the iPad

By Miguel Ortiz - August 2, 2012

During this year’s Hack Week, ROBLOX developers shifted gears, working tirelessly to devise and present ideas fueled more by creativity than priority. This week, we’re featuring some of the most innovative ideas to come out of Hack Week. Our third highlighted project is an exploration of how ROBLOX’s in-game, game-browsing and social networking interfaces might look on an iPad. These early-stage mock-ups were conceived and produced by Visual Artist Tara Byars and Visual Designer Miguel Ortiz.

ROBLOX is an expansive platform. So, when it came to mocking up a new ROBLOX interface for a new device, we quickly realized we had to narrow the scope to the stuff users want to do on the go – browse games, play games, network with friends and groups, and buy and sell content.

Hack Week: Implementing Rotatable GUIs

By Sorcus - August 1, 2012

During our annual Hack Week, ROBLOX developers shifted gears, working tirelessly to devise and present ideas fueled more by creativity than priority. This week, we’ll be featuring some of the most innovative ideas to come out of Hack Week. Our second story is about some changes that will be implemented to ROBLOX’s robust GUIs (graphical user interfaces), by Software Engineers Deepak Chandrasekaran and Tyler Mullen.

GUI text boxes

GUIs are the biggest small part of ROBLOX, and for good reason. From text buttons, to text labels, to image buttons, to frames, these 2D bits can add high-impact nuances to your games. Many of the smaller facets of ROBLOX, like our leaderboards, backpacks and our chat system, are powered by GUIs as well.

As it stands now, ROBLOX allows users to utilize two types of GUIs: screen GUIs, and billboard GUIs. Before getting into some changes we’ll be making to both, let’s describe how they work.

Hack Week: Exploring a Crafting System in ROBLOX

By Navin Lal - July 30, 2012

During this year’s Hack Week, ROBLOX developers shifted gears, working tirelessly to devise and present ideas fueled more by creativity than priority. This week, we’ll be featuring some of the most innovative ideas to come out of Hack Week. Our first story is about a “Crafting” system in ROBLOX, by Software Engineer Navin Lal.

The idea of “Crafting” has been in the gaming world for a long time; DotA, Ultima, Everquest, and even Diablo have featured their own versions of the concept. It’s an undeniably interesting idea that is worth exploring in the world of ROBLOX. In order to better explain our unique take on a crafting system, let’s split the notion into two categories: materials and recipes. We’ll go over materials first.