Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: March 31st, 2013 (GDC 2013 Edition)

March 31, 2013

Seven-day Blog Recap

Turning off bevels and upping ROBLOX’s rendering performance

Next week, we’ll be removing bevels — in basic terms these are the rounded corners of ROBLOX bricks — from ROBLOX’s rendering pipeline. This will not only increase performance, but allow us to focus more energy on implementing new rendering features, including dynamic, voxel-based shadows and lighting. To see before-and-after footage of our upcoming rendering optimizations and new graphics-quality adjustments, and learn more about why we’re making this change, please read this post and provide your feedback.

The event of the year, the ROBLOX Egg Hunt 2013, is now live

The ROBLOX Egg Hunt isn’t your grandma’s egg hunt. Our eggs attack, hide, reveal themselves in specific (and sometimes explosive) situations, and use a number of other tricks hidden up their nonexistent sleeves to make them challenging to collect. If you haven’t already played the ROBLOX Egg Hunt — which, by the way, has already been played more than 1 million times — or finished collecting the more than 20 unique eggs, you should stop reading right now and give it a shot. Or, at the least, watch this video starring egg-hunter extraordinaire John Shedletsky. (ROBLOX Egg Hunt. Do you have it?)

Learn more about the ROBLOX Egg Hunt 2013 by checking out our launch-day article.

BLOXcon passes come with exclusive virtual fedoras

Last week, we made the announcement that every BLOXcon pass comes bundled with a city-specific BLOXcon Fedora. Plus, everyone who purchases their pass before April 5th gets a special, “early-adopter” version of the fedora! There will only be a maximum of 1,000 of each fedora in the ROBLOX market, which is just another reason you should come to BLOXcon — this summer in Chicago, London and New York City. Note: you have to actually attend BLOXcon to receive your virtual fedora, so don’t go getting any ideas.

Improving quality, one enhancement at a time

At ROBLOX, we’re looking to improve the quality of the entire user experience, from Roblox.com to ROBLOX gameplay to ROBLOX Studio. Part of that pursuit is fixing seemingly minor bugs with great gameplay payoffs, including the “lag” players previously spotted when quickly swinging their camera from the first-person perspective. You can learn about the fix, the process of implementing it and the results and benefits by reading this article from Kevin He.

Spotlight: the creator of ROBLOX’s City of Rome

Seeing real-world locations re-imagined and rebuilt in ROBLOX is always cool — for players, it’s a little bit like transporting yourself to another part of the world at the click of a mouse. User Juliane14 really impressed us with his City of Rome. It’s not only well built, with many of the landmarks you’d see in the real world, but fleshed out with a system of professions that give everyone in the city a purpose; a role to play. We experienced a day in the life of City of Rome with Juliane14, and came out with an interesting Spotlight story.

ROBLOX at Game Developers Conference 2013

The game industry took San Francisco by storm last week for the Game Developers Conference 2013 (GDC). ROBLOX had a booth on the expo floor Wednesday through Friday and we met a lot of interesting game enthusiasts and game developers — both well established and up and coming. Highlights from the booth:

Twice-daily ROBLOX Battle tournaments, where winners took home a $50 Amazon gift card (I only witnessed one tournament, but it was really fun and in good spirit)
Explaining ROBLOX, its benefits and its tremendous community to a lot of people who weren’t already familiar with it
Feeling the energy and excitement of the industry all around us

I spent a chunk of time in the Independent Games Festival Pavilion of the GDC 2013 expo floor to see this year’s finalists in action. I came away with an exciting anecdote: a developer on StarForge, a game that recently passed through Steam’s Greenlight initiative, noticed my ROBLOX shirt and mentioned to me that they were making games on ROBLOX long before starting on StarForge. If there was ever any doubt ROBLOX could serve as a launching point for game developers, that put it to rest.

You should see this ROBLOX place

Robloxity is a really cool, really large ROBLOX city by user 1dev3. From houses with garages nestled in the hills to a web of streets in the shadow of skyscrapers, this sprawling level has a lot to offer — even if all you want to do is go for a Sunday drive. Most players seem to be using it as a space for role-play; I prefer to explore and find the best city vistas. This is one of the best, most fully realized cities you’ll see on ROBLOX.

Bits

ROBLOX user and community moderator briguy9876 has been releasing Egg Hunt 2013 how-to videos throughout the week. Stuck on a particularly tricky egg? This YouTube playlist might be able to help.
We’ve released a new set of iOS-exclusive items to the ROBLOX Catalog. Click here for a preview. If you’re a ROBLOX Mobile user, be sure to check them out!

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