In order to prioritize our development pipeline, we posted a blog two weeks ago opening the discussion to our users about their top three requests for ROBLOX.  While we are still carefully reading each reply, we wanted to point out a few exceptional responses, along with our developer feedback, so you can see what we are working on. Below we have selected several great comments from our players. John Shedletsky, ROBLOX’s Creative and Content Lead, provides his response in italics.

Charl3s7: It would be awesome to have a light object that attaches to a brick, and then the brick would emit light.

John: If I were to put together a list of “most-asked for ROBLOX features”, dynamic lighting would definitely be in the top three. ROBLOX’s Lead Graphics Developer, Simon Kozlov, has spent a fair amount of time researching this feature. We think we’re converging on a good strategy for adding this functionality. However, at the moment we’re focusing our graphics development effort on allowing all ROBLOX places to have 10x as many parts as they do now.

leolion113: Allow for users to find what rank someone is from an ingame script (E.g. IsInGroup (1337, “Soldier”)).

John: Expanding scripter access to our social APIs from Lua is a very high “bang for the buck” feature. This is something that is simple to implement, but gives place creators a ton of power. As groups become more central to the ROBLOX experience, features like this will become ever more important.

Anynomous: Ability to test your clothes before you buy them, without having to see someone else wears it.

John: ROBLOX Engineer, Ben Tkacheff, is currently working on extensions to the ROBLOX Lua API that will make it much easier to alter characters’ appearances in-game. This will pave the way for a “try before you buy” feature and it will also allow power users to script this for their own game.

toon2: I strongly encourage you at Roblox to take what Simon Kozlov did with his Hack week demo and implement it into the game in some form. Many commenters commented that they were astonished by how much better Roblox looked with his lighting, and were inspired to do new things with it. Secondly, when I saw the video thumbnail on Shedleskey’s SFOTHIV, I hoped that you would soon put it on the site for players to use. Finally, a lot of people had uploaded meshes through ROBLOX Studio into their games. Sure, they made ROBLOX seem less brick-related, but they were inventive. I personally don’t care for it too much, but I’ve noticed it to be a common interest, along with custom animations.

John: Users want better lighting. This has been one of the top three most requested features. Video thumbnails are actually available for players to use right now!

The ROBLOX staff is divided on the issue of whether or not to allow players to upload meshes. Moderation difficulties aside, some of us feel that custom meshes could undermine the ROBLOX aesthetic of “what you see is what you get”.  For instance, large meshes won’t collide as you expect them to. On the other hand, when confronted with this type of choice, we almost always land on the side of giving more power and creative freedom to our game developers, so it’s hard to tell what the future holds here.

Isoclism Developers:  If you click on Record Video, X makes your Body invisible to the camera, Z is to slightly pan the camera to the left, and C is to slightly pan the camera to the right.

John: Better control over the camera for creating cut-scenes is actually something ROBLOX Engineer, Tyler Mullen, has done some work on. I think the biggest feature here is to allow the ROBLOX video recorder to record “under” the game UI, so you can get an unobstructed picture in your videos.

Isoclism Developers: More features in the forums: a. Editing Posts after publishing them

b. Allow for Image Signatures with moderation

John: Upgrading the existing forums is on the Web Team roadmap for 2012.

Isoclism Developers: Add more GUI Fonts. We only have 3 right now.

John: Yes. We agree – more power to content creators.

Isoclism Developers: Allow for removal of some of the Core Gui’s.

John: Yes. Almost all of them should be removable.

Isoclism Developers: Add more Social Layer API’s for Roblox’s Lua Scripting program. Like maybe players can send messages in-game.

John: More social APIs – we agree about that too. I would be concerned with the potential for mass-spam that “send message” functionality would unlock; however I’m sure there are ways to mitigate this, like a quota system, for example.

Due to the mass number of responses, we will continue to post user comments over the next few weeks with our developer feedback.  We do take your comments seriously, and our goal is to incorporate your opinions into ROBLOX.