Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: September 29th, 2013

September 29, 2013

Seven-day blog recap

Uploadable sounds

The time has arrived! One of the most requested features of all time, the ability to upload your own sound effects and music clips, has gone live on ROBLOX.com. Hundreds of sound effects have already made their way into the database, and many of them have even been made free for the taking by their generous uploaders. For more information on uploading and inserting a sound, see our Wednesday announcement of the feature.

We’ve noticed that a few developers are on the cutting edge of the custom sounds feature. Check out these places:

The contentious price floor on clothing

As most of you know by now, we have increased the price floor on clothing items to 10 ROBUX for T-Shirts and 25 ROBUX (or 12x these amounts in tickets) for Shirts and Pants. This has caused a significant debate within the community. If you have strong feelings about the change, please read our CEO David Baszucki’s response to the community. Here is a short excerpt:

We want you to know that we hear all your concerns, especially those of clothing designers wanting high-volume sales, groups and clans with widely used uniforms, and NBC players. We are watching the forums, Twitter, our inboxes, and the data. We are also evaluating possible improvements. Please stay tuned.

The end of the BLOXcon season

After months of preparation and hosting, the summer BLOXcon season has come to an end. To recap, we started off with a mini-BLOXcon at Maker Faire Bay Area 2013, before moving on to three in-person events in Chicago, London and New York City. We capped off the world tour with the Virtual BLOXcon last weekend, which gave everyone the opportunity to experience a ROBLOX fan convention. For a complete look back at the summer of BLOXcon — photos, videos, retrospectives — check out the published stories tagged BLOXcon 2013 or check out this BLOXcon 2013 playlist on the ROBLOX YouTube channel.

Also, don’t forget that you can still watch the Virtual BLOXcon livestream, which has been archived in all of its five-hour glory on YouTube.

Save your character outfits

After much anticipation, Merely’s Outfit Saver Chrome extension has launched as an official feature on ROBLOX.com! You can now save up to 50 outfits for your character, making it easy to switch between your unique looks at the click of a button. In the past, this was a manual process of changing each inventory item and body color, so the feature should save you significant time. Go make some outfits!

You should play this game

There are many survival games on ROBLOX. You’ve got post-apocalyptic survival games like Apocalypse Rising and Deadzone, and more wilderness-oriented games like ROBLOX Survivor and Survival 303. Each spin on the formula — which can be boiled down to scavenging for nourishment and tools to battle the myriad elements — offers something unique, and now Island is making its way into the arena with a sort of primal and tribal spin that I find exciting. This game is all about collecting resources and crafting useful items. The level is sprawling and has a beautiful aesthetic, with towering trees and bold shadows. It’s a work in progress, but it might be time to start paying attention.

Bits

Objects in the way of SpotLights and PointLights now cast shadows. Our Rendering team recently launched this dynamic lighting improvement to ROBLOX, and you can expect a more thorough article about the feature early in the coming week.

Quenty has made his “Nevermore” engine open-source. This might be a useful resource for you game developers.
Here’s another potentially useful bit from Quenty.
And here’s a useful pro-tip in relation to the new Audio section of the catalog.

This was a dynamic lighting video contest entry that was apparently missed. I’m not exactly sure how that happened. It looks very nice.

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