Gearheads rejoice! This latest release is packed full of upgrades and improvements!

Gear Categories

Building an awesome sword-fighting map that allows gear? Is it being ruined by players who come in with ranged weapons? Now you can choose which types of gear you wish to allow in your place!

All gear that ROBLOX publishes will now be categorized as being a melee weapon, a ranged weapon, explosive, a power up, a navigation enhancer, a musical instrument, or a social item. Most items will only have one category but some special ones can be in multiple categories. For example, a rocket launcher would be both a ranged weapon and explosive.

Categories:

Melee Weapon – This is your basic close-ranged weapon. Swords, clubs, boxing gloves, metal chairs (if you are a wrestling fan) are all examples of melee weapons

Ranged Weapon – These are weapons that allow you to hit your enemies from far away. Examples: throwing stars, rocket launchers, crossbows, etc.

Explosive – Any weapon that creates explosions will go into this category. Explosions damage things like buildings and cars as well as people. Examples: bombs, rocket launchers, landmines.

Power Up – Power ups are items that increase your character’s stats. These could be items that restore health or increase your speed. Examples: healing potions, speed potions, or a starblox latte.

Navigation Enhancer – Items that break normal spatial rules go here. For example, items that make your character jump super high, fly or even teleport would be navigation enhancers. Basically anything that helps you get to reach hard to get to places in user levels.

Musical Instrument – We’re going to make a bunch of musical instruments that you can play in maps. Our theory is that these might be annoying to some people, so we put them into their own category so you can turn them off if you want.

Social Items – Social items are items that are fun, but don’t have any significant gameplay effects. These might be items that are “just for show” that you might use in roleplaying maps. For example, Witches Brew doesn’t do anything except make your head big and change colors. It’s wacky. It’s fun. But you’re not going to use it to win battles. Other social items would be things like magnifying glasses, suitcases, a police badge that you can flash around, etc.

Pack All Your Gear

We thought it was pretty lame that you couldn’t use more than one piece of gear at a time. Now when you visit a place, you bring all the gear you own! However, the gear needs to be allowed in the place. For example, a level that only allows melee weapons won’t let you bring in your cool throwing stars.

Rental Gear

One thing that players are constantly asking us for is a way for them to sell back their items to us. This is silly because we have all the War Rocks and Bluesteel Claws that we need. Why would we want to buy yours?

That being said, we hear you. There’s demand for cheaper items that you may only want to use for a couple of days or weeks.

This is what rental gear is all about!

Rental gear is just like regular gear except that it expires after a set amount of time. Expired gear cannot be equipped – but it can be renewed (if the gear is still for sale).

Gear that says “Expires: Never” is not rental gear. It will last forever.

A side benefit of rental gear is that, as a game designer, it is often hard for me to tell whether or not a new item is going “break” the game. Now I can release short-term rental versions of gear that I want to test. The stuff that’s good I can turn into permanent gear, and the stuff that is bad will expire shortly – never to bother anyone ever again!

Follow Friends

Having trouble getting into the same game as your friends? There’s a cool new feature that Erik cooked up. If you’re friends with another player and that player is in a game, we put a button on their profile page that will let you join that game.

Improved Installer

Madrak has been toiling in the forsaken realm of Microsoft COM for the past several weeks working to improve the ROBLOX installer. He’s fixed some pretty major bugs, which should make it easier to install ROBLOX without problems. In particular, if your windows user account name had non-ASCII characters in it, the ROBLOX installer will now work.

Faster Website

Matt and Noob007 have both been making solid progress in improving website speed and reliability. If you don’t notice anything, then it’s because they’re doing a great job.

– Telamon