Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: October 6th, 2013

October 6, 2013

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: Developer Central and the Developer Exchange program, new animations and an animation editor preview, the lowering of the price floor on clothing, a dynamic lighting and shadows update, BLOXtober festivities, a final look back at BLOXcon 2013, Parkour City, Headhunter III, and other bits and pieces. Enjoy.

Seven-day blog recap

Introducing Developer Central

Last week, we “rebranded” the Build page as the Develop page. While it includes the same functionality it always has, we have plans to expand it with developer-oriented metrics, toolkits, discussions and more. We did launch this Developer Central with one really cool feature: Developer Exchange (or DevEx). This gives successful developers an opportunity to exchange their piles of ROBUX for real-world currency. To learn more about Developer Central and how DevEx works, make sure to check out our announcement from last week.

New animations and, arguably more exciting, an animation editor

If you’ve been playing ROBLOX anytime in the last few days, you’re sure to have noticed that we’ve enabled a series of new character animations for basic movement. While the new animations bring new life to ROBLOX characters, we implemented them in such a way that we will eventually be bringing an animation editor to you so you can create your own movements! While we’re not ready to put a date on the animation editor, you can check out an approximation of how it will work by watching the video in this article.

The latest development in the price floor saga

After enabling a price floor on clothing, listening to your feedback and evaluating our own data, we have decided to reduce the price floor on clothing to 2 ROBUX/20 tickets for t-shirts, and 10 ROBUX/100 tickets for shirts and pants. This allows us to strike a balance between driving quality in the catalog and allowing even new players to acquire nice avatar clothing without having to wait too long. Thank you for your passionate feedback on this matter over the course of the last week.

Dynamic lights now support shadows

Ever since the release of dynamic lighting last spring, you and your fellow builders have united in requesting that objects blocking SpotLights and PointLights – in addition to sunlight – cast shadows. With so many people making the same request, we decided to prioritize this update in our development pipeline. While it’s a simple advancement on the surface, the Rendering Team poured significant time into making it happen without a hit to your performance. Read through our brief article to learn how to enable shadows on each light in your game or place.

BLOXtober is here!

Halloween 2013 is going to be a big event on ROBLOX. We’ve already starting rolling out our 13 days of gifts, released a series of Halloween items that are bundled with ROBLOX cards, and launched a countdown to the official kickoff. There’s more to come, so keep your eye on the blog.

A final look back at BLOXcon 2013

With BLOXcon 2013 — all four of them — in hindsight, ROBLOX Founder and CEO David Baszucki penned a post outlining his takeaways from a summer of meeting ROBLOXians worldwide.

You should play this game

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There’s no real objective in Parkour City other than look really cool as you run across rooftops, up and down walls, and through the city streets. With an arsenal of tricks, it’s not hard. Despite its decided lack of gaminess, Parkour City is an entertaining place to spend some time. Still images don’t do it justice, so I cut together a short video to try to capture the feel of the city.

If you’re looking for something with a little more replay value, you might want to try Headhunter III. This game was suggested to me by AwkwardBlockHead and, while it’s similar to other games that pit everyone against one all-powerful being, it really tugs on the strings that keep you playing just one more round. For instance, you stand to gain an item at the end of every round that buffs your character’s abilities, and by earning points you unlock new abilities. On top of that, there is a simple set of three character classes and basic cosmetic customization options. It’s enough to keep you going, but not so much that it overwhelms.

Bits

This week, more potentially useful game-development resources popped up on Twitter. This library lets you get the time and date from the ROBLOX player.
Here’s another note from crazyman32 about RemoveFunction and RemoteEvent.
Massively published an article about last month’s Virtual BLOXcon.
NowDoTheHarlemShake sent us a nice tweet last week about using ROBLOX for a school project and scoring 45/40. Here’s the place that was used in the project. Good work!
A little Halloween fan art.

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