Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: July 21st, 2013

July 21, 2013

14-day Blog Recap

BLOXcon Chicago prevented last week’s Roundup from happening (totally worthwhile tradeoff, for the record), so this time we’re doing a recap of the hottest stories of the last two weeks. In all likelihood, Roundups will continue to be every other week until we’ve wrapped up BLOXcon New York City.

BLOXcon Chicago media and award announcements

BLOXcon Chicago was a great time. The event took place on July 13th at the Museum of Science and Industry, and gave us an opportunity to meet hundreds of Midwest-residing gamers, builders and developers in person. Of course, we were busy collecting videos, photos and interviews throughout the day, and we’ve started to publish some of the good stuff. You can check out a photo gallery from the event, or read Alan’s retrospective account of the day — with a video recap included.

At BLOXcon Chicago, we announced the first five Film Fest/BLOXY Award winners, as well as five 2013 Hall of Fame winners. To see who took home the first round of awards this year, check out this extensive recap. We’ll be announcing additional winners at each forthcoming BLOXcon!

Speaking of which, BLOXcon London is next!

The excitement of BLOXcon is all but finished. In just a few days, another ROBLOX team 20-strong will be packing up and traversing the Atlantic for BLOXcon London! The event is scheduled to kick off at 9 a.m. sharp at London’s Royal Air Force Museum, and we’re expecting a day just as awesome as BLOXcon Chicago. To see which ROBLOX staff will be at the event, check out this previous blog post. For some tips on making the most of BLOXcon London, check out yesterday’s post.

Outlines and aesthetics

Roughly 10 days ago, we enabled a new rendering feature: outlines. Outlines essentially put visible borders on the sharp edges of parts and terrain you use to build your games, places and levels. The inspiration for outlines came from the look of 3D editors and CAD systems, and we think they work for ROBLOX for a few reasons:

Precision. The core of ROBLOX is content creation. Outlines give you a sense of precision when building – you can be sure you’re accurate when manipulating parts.
Inner structure. Everything on ROBLOX is comprised of real, physically simulated primitives (excluding terrain), largely placed by hand. Outlines communicate the complexity and inner-workings of the environments and models you build.
Aesthetics. What you see in ROBLOX is identifiable as ROBLOX. Plus, outlines are smooth (i.e., antialiased) and a scalable alternative to bevels.

We’re aware that many creators of highly detailed, CFramed places feel outlines negatively affect their builds. We are continuing to listen to your feedback and work toward solutions to such problems. As mentioned in the original post, outlines are an experimental feature and we are by no means finished working on them.

Chadthedestroyer2’s After the Flash: Darkness

The world has, for the most part, been destroyed. You are a survivor, sifting through the wreckage of what used to be the town or city you called home.

That might sound familiar — after all, in the wake of Fallout 3 and DayZ, post-apocalyptic games are commonplace these days. But chadthedestroyer2 has brough his own flair to the genre with After the Flash: Darkness, a hybrid role-play and post-apocalyptic survival game. Find out what inspired him to create this dynamically lit masterpiece of atmosphere and the things that happen in such a dark world.

Paid Access launches to ROBLOX.com

We’ve also launched the Paid Access feature, which gives builders and game developers the opportunity to sell access to their content, to ROBLOX.com. This is not only another opportunity for content creators to earn ROBUX for making great stuff, but another means of getting great stuff more visibility on our Games page. Everyone can experiment with Paid Access — what remains to be seen is what method of leveraging it will truly work. Will it be selling access to a premium version of a free game? Charging for access to an early beta? Something else entirely? It’s up to you. Time will tell.

You should play this ROBLOX game

With BLOXcon London coming up, it’s only fitting that I feature City of London, UK by cooldude215 (TheMadGod, lNewpoint, JungHee, FighterAce and Jardicel also have building credits) this week. The game is a faithful recreation of London, rounded out with many popular landmarks, including Big Ben and The Palace of Westminster, The Gherkin, Tower Bridge and more. You can use the Tube to teleport quickly from location to location, or jump on a double decker bus for a more visual tour. Get in the BLOXcon spirit by visiting this sprawling city today.

Special segment: Alan’s experience at “Klamfest”

I got to spend a day with Klamman and Aaronstone4real, the founding members of the Klam Knights group. You may recognize the names from a Spotlight we wrote about them a few months ago. Similar to BLOXcon, KlamFest was a grand gathering where the two founders took to a massive stage and walked their group members through announcements, showed prototypes, and demonstrated games in the pipeline. The show was a spectacle: music was playing, the floor and lights were flashing colors, and there was a huge projection screen that changed in real time along with the topics.

After the presentation, we headed outside of the “venue,” where they showed us a dynamic and ever-shifting central stage. It morphed several times between a sword-fighting map, a shootout map, and an obstacle course. At one point it became a never-before-seen level that one of the group members decided to debut. ROBLOX groups do a lot of interesting and organized activities, and we’re looking forward to experiencing more.

Bits

TheGamer101’s Sword Fighting Tournament reached the 20-million-plays milestone. That’s a big accomplishment — congratulations.
Here’s a YouTube channel with a bunch of cool user-created rendering demos.
Keep an eye on the #BLOXcon hashtag on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Google+. There’s going to be a lot of photos, videos and updates to see over the next few weeks!

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