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Maybe you’ve been coding video games since you were 8. Maybe you’re a battle-hardened veteran of the games industry. Or perhaps you’ve spent the past 10 years of your life writing office software and now it is time for a change.
| September 3, 2008 -
[email protected]
a Maybe you’ve been coding video games since you were 8. Maybe you’re a battle-hardened veteran of the games industry. Or perhaps you’ve spent the past 10 years of your life writing office software and now it is time for a change. This is your opportunity to get in on a great project, with an awesome team, on the ground floor. Check out our new - Telamon a
| September 3, 2008 -
Recent Updates to ROBLOX
We put out a new release on August 19, 2008. We’ve been meaning to post about the awesome new features but we got super busy! Many users have already discovered some of these features. WonkaKid over at strong If you want to reset your place to an earlier version you can do it with this feature! To use the feature do these steps. First click the Configure This place link on your place. The link will show up under the description of any place you own. Then all you need to do is select a previous version of the place. That’s pretty cool. strong We made the walking speed of Robloxians changeable. It is a property of the Humanoid class, and its default is 16. If you set it to a negative speed, it reverses people’s controls. Note: if you set it to a very high speed, you will start walking through walls. strong We also allowed sparkles to change color. To change them edit the Color property in the Sparkles in Roblox Studio (in the Explorer pane). Some colors may not work as well as others. strong When you’re in a place that has teams on the leaderboard you can chat directly to your team. To do this type Example: em strong Hmm let’s see. There’s a new places display on the main page. A new installer. Some new awesome moderation features (that you’ll never see). A lot of lag reduction and behind the scenes stuff. We really have been working hard! Check out this movie by PRG. It shows off some of the features! embed If you’d like to talk about these features some more then go join -Clockwork & ReeseMcBlox a
| August 30, 2008 -
Technical Note: Internet Explorer
There is a technical issue that is affecting a small number of users. Did Internet Explorer stop working on your computer? Please read this message from our technical support and testing. They are here to help! You should also probably include the following info in your email: Username and what type of Windows you have. (To make sure it’s Vista) -ReeseMcBlox a
| August 30, 2008 -
Olympics 2008 Video Mini-Contest Winners
Announcing are the Video Mini-contest winners! How were they chosen? ReeseMcBlox looked at the top viewed videos as of midnight Aug 11, 2008 and then removed anyone who didn’t qualify. Ten Videos were decided as the winners. Check them out in this play list! embed Winners of the Black Iron Ring of Olympia for Video Mini-contest: yozy, cobrastrike4, maax1996, piecrust, arisshah, twisteddemo, bmoreboy, canary4life, gaomon94, sheeppie, MarioMario54321 The Building Contest winners and prizes are not finalized yet. We’re very busy working to deliver all the prizes. There were so many winners! Please be patient - The requirements of the Building Contest were changed to make it so more people would win. The new arrangement is like this. *you had an Olympics2008 place on your account when we ran the database search earlier today. Please wait until tomorrow to see if you get the hat you think you should. Chat more about this contest on -ReeseMcBlox a
| August 13, 2008 -
ROBLOX Olympics 2008 Contest Update
We wanted to remind everyone about the rules for the event so there’s no confusion. The instructions for entry are here. strong Olympics2008 Obstacle courses are not allowed. Your place has to look like a real sporting event or sports place, not a computer level. You can work in teams but only the owner of the place gets the prize, no one else. Same for video teams, only the poster of the video gets the prize. You may have more than 1 sport in your place but 1 is enough. You don’t need 2. But if you have 2 or more it’s ok. Don’t forget about the movie mini-contest. There are some cool things going on there too. Check out Remember to post about your place entries and your YouTube video Also be sure to be a good sport and visit other people’s places. This is a time to celebrate the creativity and productions of your fellow Robloxians! The best way to make friends and help the community is to give a little time to others. -ReeseMcBlox a
| August 9, 2008 -
ROBLOX Olympics Building Contest
We’re having a building contest. Yay! The theme for this contest is the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. We want you to build a ROBLOX place to host one of the games. Then once everything is in place there will be plenty of locations for people to play Olympics games of your own. strong 1. Make a new place with the title “Olympics2008 ________________” with whatever you want to call the place on the blank line. 2. Your place must be on your main account and still there at the time the contest ends 3. The place must be Olympic Games related. It must be about one of the Olympic sports, or be one of the locations for the Beijing 2008 games. On the Official Beijing Olympics site there is a list of the p strong Prize Winners will be chosen in the following way. At midnight (Pacific Time) at the end of the contest we will run a database search to find the Visits count and Favorites count for entries. Our searches will know how many visits and favorites came after the start of the contest. We realize that one person may win more than one category. That is allowed. To prevent popularity loading we will not announce the winners of any prize until *The Mystery requirement will not be revealed until the end of the contest. Don’t ask! strong p We can’t wait to see what sorts of sports places, arenas, and fun locations you guys can make for this contest. The contest starts now so get to building! -ReeseMcBlox a
| August 1, 2008 -
ROBLOX Desktop Wallpaper
Desktop a little drab? You need some ROBLOX wallpaper! Here are some high quality ROBLOX renders created by If you are feeling creative, you can make your own ROBLOX wallpaper and tell us about it! You can use a service such as ROBLOX admins will be keeping their eyes out for any really great wallpapers, and may post a couple here. If anything you make is chosen, we’ll award you a small ticket bonus in recognition. strong a a a strong a strong a - Telamon a
| July 20, 2008 -
Travelbloxxers – Journey Into PlaceRebuilder’s World
When I first heard about Trading Worlds, I was a bit skeptical. From what I had heard, it was a state of the art place, including its own economy. This made me think of any old RPG place that was lucky enough to wind up on the front page. I wonder...
| July 9, 2008 -
Travelbloxxers - Journey Into PlaceRebuilder’s World
When I first heard about Trading Worlds, I was a bit skeptical. From what I had heard, it was a state of the art place, including its own economy. This made me think of any old RPG place that was lucky enough to wind up on the front page. I wondered if it was even worth clicking on the visit online button, which for me means a few minutes wait while the game loads. When I began to play however, I was proved to be wrong. Another interesting prospect of trading worlds is its player interactions. You often see a player acting more respectful towards the town rent keeper than to a grizzly old pirate. You will notice how players will cheer on the gladiator, but heckle the challenger from lands afar (that is, unless your wager was on the challenger!). A shipper carrying pumpkins into town is often greeted with warm smiles and a free root beer, but a shipper carrying spinach is quickly thrown out. By playing this game you learn a lot about your fellow Robloxian’s personality then you would in Shark Attack by Huntermc. However, this game can only be seen at its best with many different people with many different occupations. I enjoy it most when you focus on shipping and trading more than killing and looting. Fighting has become a large part of this game, and it shouldn’t be. I have to admit that this is one of my all time favorite maps in my almost whole year of Roblox. Its unique game play and innovative style really appeals to more hardcore users who have played for a while. I have to rate this place an 8/10 because although there are many exploitable loopholes in this map, it is still so much fun at the end of a long day. Rivaling classics like Ultimate Paintball CTF by miked and Sword Fight on the Heights III, PlaceRebuilder has hit the jackpot with his newest addition to the Roblox hall of fame. em -ReeseMcBlox a
| July 9, 2008 -
ROBLOX Action Adventure Contest Winners
We’re finally done! Judging this event was really hard. The ROBLOX staff watched every entered video. We took notes and in the end it was a very close call for all the categories. p Five Best Motion Picture Awards a a a a a Three Best Acting Awards a a a See all the movies in one playlist! embed -ReeseMcBlox a
| July 6, 2008 -
Scripting With Telamon: Debugging
Howdy! Today’s article is for Roblox power users who want to learn how to develop scripts in Roblox. This is not a programming language tutorial - I will assume you know enough about Lua to look at a piece of code and guess at what it does. Rather I am going to teach you how to deal with buggy scripts and show how to debug them. Debugging in general is a mystical art - I use the word "art", which is the product of innate creative forces, in contrast to "science", which can be dissected, reduced, and taught. We’ve built some tools into Roblox Studio to help you though. strong We’re going to build a secret door. An easy way to make a secret door is to make a brick and set its CanCollide property to false. Anyone can them walk through such a brick. No. Our secret door is going to be special. It’s eventually going to guard the treasure room in my castle and it’s only going to let approved members of the Pirate Army through (Arrrrr!). Clearly we need some scripting here, me hearties. strong When I’m making a complicated script, I try to test it as I go along. I’ve seen a lot of people in intro programming classes try to write all their code at once and then test it. This is about the most painful way to write code. Don’t do it. Instead, write the shortest bit of code that you can test. Test it. If it works, add some more stuff. Then test it. If something broke, you know where to start looking. A more simple version of the door we want to make is a door that just turns transparent whenever anything touches it. a strong Ok, time to break out the power tools. If you have been scripting without these, I feel sorry for you. There are two that I will talk about today: the Output window and the Command toolbar. The first is by far the most useful, so I will focus on it. To bring up the Output window, use the View -> Output menu option. This is add a window pane to the bottom of your screen. This window will show the output from your scripts while they are running. If your script has an error in it, the error will be printed here along with the line number telling you where the script broke. Let’s look at both of these right now. In your new script, paste the following code: p As you can probably tell, this script prints "Hello world!", spits out the numbers 1 to 10 and then crashes on an error. If you press the Run button in Studio, you can see this. The output will look like this: p This is telling us that line 7 of our script is bad, which is something we already knew. However, in a more complicated script, it can be very helpful to print out stuff as the script is running so that you can see where things are going wrong. It may seem obvious once I’ve said it, but if something is broken with your script, start printing stuff out - rare is the bug that will not succumb to this level of scrutiny. I once wrote an entire operating system, using only printf to debug it. a p And if you have a part named "Door" in your level, it will be immediately teleported to (0, 100 ,0) while the game is running. This is kindof arcane, but I mention it because I have found the Command Toolbar useful on occasion. strong Here it is: p If you have ever seriously tried to learn lua scripting for Roblox, you have looked at some Roblox scripts. The code for listening to a Touch event should look familiar. Basically I have wired up the Part.Touched event to call the onTouched function whenever the part is touched by another part. When this happens, the door will turn semi-transparent for 5 seconds. Add this to your Door script, save your map, and try it. If you touch or shoot the door, you will see a nice effect. If you have the Output Window up, you will also see a "Door Hit" message printed whenever the door is touched. If you did not see this message, you would know that the onTouch function was not being called and that you had not wired up the event handler correctly. strong Like I said, this is not a tutorial on actually writing code, only debugging it. So here is the finished script: p It has one bug in it. Without using the Output Window, the only thing you will be able to tell is that the script is not working. With the Output Window, the problem becomes obvious: p Since the script prints out "Door Hit", but not "Human touched door", we know the problem is somewhere in line 18 or 19 of the code. The Output window tells us that there is a problem on line 18 - FindFirstChild is failing. Ah! That is because in Lua methods are invoked using a colon (:) instead of a dot (.) (all other languages of consequence use dots for this - curse the inventors of Lua!) Change the line 18 to be: p a - Telamon a
| June 30, 2008 -
Scripting With Telamon: Debugging
Howdy! Today’s article is for Roblox power users who want to learn how to develop scripts in Roblox. This is not a programming language tutorial – I will assume you know enough about Lua to look at a piece of code and guess at what it does.
| June 30, 2008 -
Action Adventure Movie Contest Update
b This hat is the prize for this movie contest. Isn’t it majestic? Read how to enter in the b Our Staff have already started watching the videos and are finding some really great stuff. Remember, if your video is longer than 3 minutes the staff may not watch past there - but a movie over 3 minutes still can win! We have a lot of movies to see. So keep it interesting! The contest Closes b Two ways to win this hat! 1. There will be 2. From among all the movies the staff will also pick winners for special categories. The winners will receive the Award Hat and $R 1000 each. In order to win the username must be listed in the YouTube movie’s information by the person who posted the video. There is still plenty of time to make a great movie! Talk about it and look for helpers on our -ReeseMcBlox a
| June 24, 2008 -
Want to earn R$ 20,000 for doing almost nothing?
No, this isn’t a pyramid scheme or real estate scam. But wait, there’s more! I know what you’re thinking…this sounds great, but how do I get credit for recommending a candidate? -BrightEyes a
| June 20, 2008 -
Want to earn R$ 20,000 for doing almost nothing?
No, this isn’t a pyramid scheme or real estate scam. Roblox wants to hire a Web Developer and a Graphics & Game Guru and we want a Robloxian to recommend someone.
| June 20, 2008 -
Action Adventure Movie Contest
Introducing ROBLOXiwood is open for business! We’re having a movie contest to celebrate. The theme is Action and Adventure. Be sure to read all the guidelines below to make sure your YouTube movie gets entered. An Action Adventure movie is one that has a thrills, chills, and a good story. The characters have to get into some sort of trouble and then get themselves out or be saved. Your movie can be an original work or a scene from one of your favorite “real” movies. Prizes! Two ways to win! 2. From among all the movies the staff will also pick winners for special categories. The winners will receive the Award Hat and $R 1000 each. In order to win the username must be listed in the YouTube movie’s information by the person who posted the video. Rules 1. Create an Action Adventure ROBLOX video. All entries must be a movie/video. You can learn how to make Roblox movies from our 2. Please make all videos suitable for viewing by kids, grandmas, school teachers, and your next door neighbor. No profanity or inappropriate images. Any video that breaks the 3. Videos should be between 30 seconds and 3 minutes long. Keep it short so the action doesn’t get lost in long scenes. Most of the footage should be ROBLOX related. 4. On your video page put the following information. 5. Contest Closes 6. There is no rule six! How To Win The winners will be chosen by the ROBLOX Team who will search for videos with all the right things. Videos must have been uploaded since the contest started (no old videos!), must have the ROBLOX link and june-action tags (and other tags), and must have your username. Most of all they must have Action and Adventure! This contest is subjective to the Team’s opinion. Not everyone will agree that your video is a winner, but we hope it is! p I can’t wait to see the exciting things you guys create! -ReeseMcBlox a
| June 14, 2008