Every week, we’re busy telling the stories behind our community, 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: two great articulated physics demos, an inside look at the creation of crazyman32’s Nuclear Simulation, games taking advantage of the sounds feature, a dodgeball-themed Crossfire, a Spotlight on starmarine614, body packages for everyone, Laserbike Racing, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Seven-day blog recap

Exploring articulated physics, part two

In our second look inside the development of our new articulated physics engine, we went big — with a towering mech and robust tank. Both demos serve to push the limits of the articulated physics engine and highlight areas for improvement. They look solid in their current state, so head over to the original blog article to view them in full.

To recap, here’s what you’ve seen of articulated physics so far:

• Kevin He’s articulated physics spotlight at BLOXcon NYC
• Front-end loader demo and intro to articulated physics
• Crash Canyone demo at Virtual BLOXcon
• Mech and tank demos

We’ll have more in the near future!

Developing Nuclear Simulation with crazyman32

Veteran developer crazyman32 was quick to leverage our new uploadable-sounds feature with his cinematic Nuclear Simulation experience, and he’s captured so many ROBLOXians’ attention that we asked him to write an article about the place’s creation. What’s particularly interesting about the journal is his explanation of how he harnessed sounds to complete the experience:

The biggest thing I learned from this experiment is that you can create awesome and useful sound effects by doing simple tasks around a microphone, like clapping your hands or stomping your feet

Learn more about Nuclear Simulation — which crazyman32 is now transitioning into a full-fledged game — by reading this Developers Journal. He’s also made public the tasks required to complete the game and his progress in completing them!

Other games taking advantage of sound

Crazyman32 isn’t the only developer who’s making good use of sounds. We dug through the ROBLOX games list to try to find other places that use audio to add to the experience. See what we found.

A dodgeball-themed Crossfire

Alexnewtron’s complete refresh of his long-tenured Dodgeball game started making waves when it launched about a week and a half ago. Since then, it’s quickly climbed to the top of various game sorts, including Popular and Top Earning. While there aren’t any other highly successful dodgeball games on the ROBLOX market, Luke Weber (aka stickmasterluke) did handle the implementation of a dodgeball mode in ROBLOX Battle. We had the two get together to talk about their history on ROBLOX, the balance of skill and luck in ROBLOXian dodgeball, the recent DevEx feature, and more. The latest Crossfire is a lengthy, but entertaining read from a pair of very successful game designers.

Spotlight: starmarine614 and ROBLOX Point Theme Park

Starmarine614 has had an interesting presence over the last couple months. He was one of the first builders to leverage Paid Access by offering early access, has offered “free weekends” for his near-finished theme park, and was among the first to earn some real-world money with the DevEx program. We talked to him in our latest Spotlight not only about the creation of ROBLOX Point Theme Park, but a recent life event that made him particularly grateful for the launch of DevEx.

Body packages for all!

In the spirit of BLOXtober, we decided to make body packages — those wild morphs for your character — available to all ROBLOXians. Going forward, new packages will be exclusive to Builders Club members for a limited time before becoming available to everyone.

You should play this game

Laserbike Racing is the latest release from acclaimed developer TheAmazeman. While the game is ultimately built around our Hyperbike gear, TheAmazeman has done significant work to elevate the gear to a new level of fun and excitement. The basic concept is this: every few minutes, there’s a race, in which each competitor gets a Laserbike that emits a devastating trail. The competitors race down a straight track that’s littered with speedramps, obstacles and gold. However, it’s more than just taking first place; the game rewards you the most for causing explosive collisions by forcing other racers into your Laserbike trail. If you’re really good, you’re leading the pack, boxing in nearby opponents, and collecting gold. TheAmazeman is still tweaking Laserbike Racing, and it keeps getting more fun, but it’s worth trying today. (There’s even a Halloween theme right now!)

Bits

• An oft-requested feature came to ROBLOX.com last week: you can now remove ranks from your groups!
• In a single image, crazyman32 has published a tutorial for creating your own custom events.
• Builders and developers can now use scripts to hide the ROBLOX’s core GUI elements. Check out this forum thread for a discussion on the topic.
• The new water has released on the desktop client. A good place to see it is BattleBoats by um3k. Try building with it and let us know if you create something purty. We’ll have more information in the near future.

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