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: a significant boost in physics performance, behind the scenes with Customer Service, Gamehero’s MIDI player in ROBLOX, Behind the BLOX, an invitation to ROBLOX HQ, we respond to your questions and ideas, Ozzypig’s latest hit game Juggernaut, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Seven-day Blog Recap

Speeding up ROBLOX’s physics by optimizing collisions

ROBLOX physics guru Kevin He has changed the way our physics engine models collisions between parts to boost its speed by 2-4x. What does this mean to you, the builder and player? More simultaneous moving parts without slowdown and, arguably more importantly, more epic explosions. You can read all about the shift from modeling collisions with “springs” to “impulses” — and see some telling video evidence of its benefits — by checking out Kevin’s in-depth article.

Gamehero’s MIDI player allows you to put music in your games 

User Gamehero created a model that you can use to add MIDI songs to your games. The songs you add are fully customizable as well–you can tweak each virtual instrument so the song sounds exactly the way you intend. Check out our blog post about it to learn more.

Behind the BLOX at ROBLOX HQ

We’ve decided to open our doors to our users every Friday at 3:30 PM–Behind the BLOX gives you the chance to come in and chat with our staff, kick around ideas and experiences, and get a sneak peek at some of our upcoming endeavors. We plan on making this a standard weekly practice, so feel free to apply each week. Check out this blog article for more details on the application process. Can’t wait to meet you all!

Behind the scenes with ROBLOX Customer Service

ROBLOX’s Customer Service team fields thousands of requests, questions and concerns from the ROBLOX community every week, but we don’t often stop to think about the numerous people sending responses and helping users day in and day out. In this blog article, we find out what life is like behind the scenes, and offer some tips you can use to keep your ROBLOX account secure.

Responses to your questions and ideas

We occasionally like to go on the hunt for hot topics and questions in the ROBLOX community, then have the ROBLOX team respond to them. This time, we entered a bunch of popular games and asked players what they want from ROBLOX and what questions they have for our developers. The result is this, the latest edition of our ongoing Responding to User Feedback series.

You should see these ROBLOX places

Juggernaut is the latest game by well known user Ozzypig — also responsible for one of the top Hunger Games places on ROBLOX — and it’s pure, frantic fun. The concept isn’t too far removed from that of The Stalker, another recently featured game, in that it’s everybody against one. In this case, though, it’s all about launching an all-out assault on the Juggernaut, a randomly selected, fast-moving, damage-dealing, incredibly hard-to-defeat player. I’ve played a number of sessions, and it’s really fun to see hordes of ROBLOXians chasing after one Juggernaut — tons of action.

Players battle the Juggernaut using swords and bow-and-arrows — additional weapon upgrades are available — in a rotating selection of maps. Teamwork is key; the Juggernaut is so powerful that you’ll need to stick together, take advantage of the healing power of medics, and formulate an assault from all angles.

Note: Ozzypig has created a useful forum post that explains not only the development process of Juggernaut, but some tips you can use when creating your own game.

Bits

Ever heard of Ludum Dare? It’s an “accelerated game development event” where participants “develop games from scratch in a weekend, based on a theme suggested by community.” LuaLearners.org, a ROBLOX scripting website/community, hosts their own events of this variety. Their recent Ludum Dare lead to some pretty cool ROBLOX creations, including an animated, GUI-based game set in the wild west, and a creepy puzzler/adventure crossover game called Abducted. They’re worth checking out, especially considering they were built very quickly.

• We recently posted a video review of last week’s featured game, Checkpoint Racing
• If you haven’t yet checked out the February issue of RoGo Magazine, take a look today

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