Blog Archive
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: new streaming parts feature, you can change your username, the winners of the costume contest, polishing and adding content to The Witching Hour, a Crossfire featuring the Darkness and The Stalker devs, Dungeon Delver‘s quality Halloween update, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.
Seven-day blog recap
Streaming parts
This week saw the launch of streaming parts, an optional client networking feature that drastically speeds join time into games and streams parts in and out based on available system resources. If you’re a builder or game developer — particularly one who creates worlds with grand scale — this is a feature worth considering. To learn how to enable it, see last Thursday’s blog post. The article also features feedback from a pair of early adopters who found that the feature significantly improved the player experience in their games.
On a related note, John took advantage of streaming to create and upload a new version of Crossroads that is actually 81 copies of Crossroads. (That’s 380,000-odd parts.) Because streaming is enabled, even those of you with lower-end computers should be able to play it. You just won’t see everything at once.
Tired of your username? Change it!
You can now change your username. There are some caveats as to how it works — notably, you’ll never truly “escape” your original moniker — but ultimately the feature lets you take everything you’ve amassed during your time on ROBLOX and roll it to a new account name. To learn more about the feature and other minor details that go along with it, read the feature announcement.
BLOXtober Costume Contest winners
It’s hard to believe it was less than two weeks ago that we kicked off the costume contest. In just the few days it was open, we received 17,000 entries and, during the weekend voting period, more than 200,000 votes were cast! The contest was short, but sweet (and busy), and this week we came right back at you with an announcement of the winners. All 500 of them. Check out the blog post to see a list of everyone who won, as well as a more detailed breakdown of the top five winners and prizes. Thanks, once again, to everyone who participated for making it such an exciting contest!
The Witching Hour is open to all (and growing)
This week in BLOXtober also saw the public release of our 2013 Halloween game, The Witching Hour. The Games team has been hard at work since then adding new content and polishing the play experience, so if you haven’t played in a few days, well, it’s time to go back. There’s more to do, and a bunch of new prizes (BLOXikins!) to attain. One important point to note: the more BLOXikins you collect, the better prize you’re going to get at the end of the event. Get questing ASAP!
CloneTrooper1019 and loleris discuss their invisible-beast-hunts-down-the-ROBLOXians games
With our latest Crossfire, we got into the spirit of the Halloween season by featuring the developers of two highly tense and competing games: Darkness and The Stalker. Both games pit a server’s worth of players against one all-powerful and near-invisible beast with inhuman powers. The article covers a range of topics, including making ROBUX using Game Passes and leveraging DevEx, the importance of uploadable sounds, and other assorted game design topics. Read through it to learn more about what goes on in the minds of these successful developers.
You should play this game
The Dungeon Delver Halloween boss battle!
I’m a bit of a fanboy for Dungeon Delver, and we’ve talked about the game (and its developers) in the past, but I got back into it with the recently launched Halloween update. The development duo behind the game were totally on top of things, with a high-quality Halloween boss battle and new currency (candy) ready to go by the time mid-October rolled around. For the uninitiated, Dungeon Delver is a loot-based RPG where you and your friends can explore random dungeons to collect an increasingly powerful arsenal of goods and abilities. It’s a tried-and-true formula, but the game looks fantastic and the gameplay always keeps you going for just one more dungeon. If you haven’t played it already, now would be a good time.
Bits
- Here’s a demo of an interpolation API crazyman32 is releasing.
- Developers should note this listing of the ROBLOX class hierarchy, courtesy of veteran Anaminus
- This is a “hugely important video for serious game devs,” according to user ZizZazZuz. What do you think?
- Under-appreciated and (relatively) new feature: the ability to archive private messages. It’s the little things, right?
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