Blog Archive
Every week, we’re busy telling the stories behind our platform, our technology, and our place in the gaming and technology industries. For those of you who catch up with ROBLOX over the weekend, the Weekly ROBLOX Roundup collects the best stuff to hit our various avenues of publication in the last week. This time: Build and Battle, ROBLOX’s mock Hackathon, character models, terrain and more.
Build and Battle: A new breed of ROBLOX game
Build and Battle is a team-based shooter where the objective is to take out your opponent’s energy core. Sounds simple enough, right? ROBLOX’s Content team ran with the basic foundation, introducing randomly generated terrain, resource collection, base building and more. You can read all about it and watch a video featuring ROBLOX developer Rohan, or jump right into a match.
ROBLOX’s “mock Hackathon”
A couple Fridays back, we announced a Hackathon for ROBLOX Game Conference 2012 and a “dry run” at the ROBLOX HQ. Well, we did the dry run, and we have video evidence to prove it — and how fun the actual event will be.
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Character models progress report
Our latest entry in the “Character Explorations” series shows the version-3.0 character models, all dressed up to create a variety of personalities. You’ve got Sarge, a comically deranged-looking soldier, and Dr. Smith, the evil genius, and Missy, and… Well, just check out the embedded video to see them in the virtual flesh.
Run Length Encoding
There are multiple reasons why ROBLOX’s terrain is efficient and scalable, one of which is Run Length Encoding. ROBLOX developer Daniel Ignatoff crunched some numbers for us, showing how Run Length Encoding and compression techniques drive down file sizes for terrain-based ROBLOX games. Put on your math hat and check it out.
ROBLOX, elsewhere on the webMassively.com writer Karen Bryan published a great “first-impressions” article about ROBLOX, and very elegantly observed some key differences between our platform and the oft-compared Minecraft. Roblox often gets compared to Minecraft, and while both have block-style graphics and offer players the opportunity to build in-game worlds, I think Roblox has a depth to it that Minecraft does not. Roblox is part computer science, part game design, part multiplayer-game, and part lemonade stand … Minecraft and Roblox actually seem to be headed in different directions, so I think the differences will be even more stark down the road. |
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