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Blog Archive

Building Against the Grain

March 18, 2009

by John Shedletsky


Archive Tech

WeNeedWood 

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

CloseUpWood

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

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