What's in the game with Early Access?

Well, I am one of the few hundred to buy early access to the game for 1,000 Robux.What's in the game though? Well, we know that you will have to buy extra maps, but the current map take about 15 minutes to cross.

-Quest 1 Builderman- Oh no, Town Hall is under attack and Builderman needs you to go get planks to help fortify the Town Hall! How do you get planks? Trick or Treating of course! Any time you go ring a door bell, you will be transported into an area where you have to defeat a Spider and a Wolf, doing so will give you a plank.

Along with Planks after battles, you can also earn limbs. Reason for it is unknown, but it is suspected that you will get some item in-game if you get a full package of Arms, Legs, Torsos, and Hats. The current packages seen are Robot, Police Officer, and Space Trooper.

Current maps are many towns, and very easy to get lost [I sure got lost most of the time], a swamp, a valley, and a forest.

What do I attack enemies with?

Well, you have special elemental powers that you can use! Ranging from sword slashes to spider webs, snare traps to blasts of light! Once in the arena, below your Health and EXP bar will be tools that you have to press a special key to use. Press T to target an enemy, and the attack will go for that enemy.

July 25 2013 Site Updates

Earlier there were a few site updates, here is a list of the ones I know of.

• New Cursor in-game.
• Now if you're invited to a party while in-game, you will leave the game automatically.

Personally, I find the party update a TERRIBLE idea.

If I did miss anything, be sure to leave a comment!

Dynamic Lighting on the go

You’ve probably noticed by now that the lights are on in ROBLOX Mobile. As with many significant rendering updates, getting dynamic lighting to illuminate iPhone and iPad screens was a tricky endeavor that brought our engineers face to face with some very specific technical hurdles. We got the chance to sit down with Graphics and Rendering Specialist Arseny Kapoulkine to get the scoop on porting dynamic lighting to mobile devices.

Shaders

To understand how we pulled this off, let’s start simple. Computers that can support dynamic lighting (about 97% of the computers running ROBLOX) are able to do so by utilizing shaders built into their graphics card. So our first question was, “will we be able to utilize the graphics technology bundled into iPhones and iPads to utilize shaders?” Lucky for us, iPads and iPhones 4 and higher have shader support baked in.

A shader is a program that tells your computer how to essentially “draw” things in 3D space. On PC, we are able to control whether an individual object is drawn using a shader (for example, we do not use a shader to draw UI elements and skyboxes). The opposite is the case for iOS. It’s all or nothing. You can either add shading to every single thing you create, or have none at all. In order for us to get our dynamic lighting system to play nice with iOS, we had to make sure that everything you can possibly draw or create on ROBLOX has a version with shaders enabled. This took a while.

Performance

The iPad and iPhone hardware is significantly slower than your average personal computer, which was another development challenge. We worked around this by quickening the pace of our code (more on this later), and by carefully reducing the frequency of lighting updates for areas that are outside of your immediate point of view. This is a tradeoff between lighting lag (i.e. outdated lighting information) and gameplay lag (i.e. the inability to move the camera). If a place with a lot of moving lights begins slowing or lagging, we slow the frequency of lighting communication to speed the game up.  

 

 

Leveraging CPU Architecture

Rendering lighting is resource intensive–we have to compute complex lighting interactions with a high number of voxels at an interactive framerate. To do this, we use many tricks that help keep our lighting system fast, and some of these tricks rely on the specific CPU architecture.
A very powerful and commonly used tool for developers is SIMD. On a basic level, this tool allows you to do several arithmetic operations in parallel without utilizing multiple cores. Instead of having your processor add two numbers together, this tool allows it to add up to 16 pairs of numbers together, at roughly the same cost!
However, nothing comes free–not every algorithm out there can utilize SIMD effectively. In addition, writing SIMD code is hacky and time consuming. This is why we’re careful about only optimizing code with SIMD instructions that executes often enough to make a huge difference performance-wise. Prior to the mobile update, we had optimized most of the lighting code using the SSE2 instruction set.
SSE2 can only be used on Intel architecture–processors in iPads and iPhones are different than the ones found in your average PC. iOS tech runs on ARM architecture, which has an entirely different–and incompatible–instruction set for SIMD called NEON. In order to fully leverage the processing power available in the portable devices, we had to re-write the lighting code to utilize and understand NEON instructions where appropriate.
It takes quite a bit of time to optimize code using SIMD–not every algorithm fits the restrictions that these powerful instructions have, but the gains make it worth the extra work. In the case of lighting, we were able to get our system moving 4x faster as a whole, with some specific areas experiencing as much as a 10x speed up. We were able to achieve this because we carefully optimized the code to use the available enhanced instructions that ARM can understand.

Going From Here

With the mobile release, dynamic lighting is fully deployed across every piece of hardware ROBLOX supports. That means phase one of dynamic lighting is finally complete, and we can move on to some exciting new features that we’re not quite ready to mention. We’ll throw you this bone: we’re working on something that many of you have requested since the first day dynamic lighting hit ROBLOX. Keep an eye out.

 

Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down!

Just now ROBLOX made a very nice update of Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down. Similar to liking a video on Youtube, this will help players figure out if a game is good, or bad to play.

What do you think of this update?

Leave a comment below!

~NOTICE~ Prices, what happened?!

Yesterday ALL prices glitched so everything was 1 ticket, so people went and spent every ticket they had on unavailable items like the Dominus, etc.

ROBLOX has fixed this glitch, and anyone who bought an item yesterday will get it removed with NO REFUND.

But soon, they will be removed, for now, enjoy your glitched items.



ROBLOX STAHP MAKIN' GLITCHES

You must now be verified to comment

You know how when you go to item comments in the Catalog, or comments on places, and they’re filled with spam and scamming links and nonsense? Don’t you hate that? Yeah, we do too. A lot.



That’s why starting today, a verified e-mail will berequired to post comments on items and places. We are doing this to increase the quality of participation, and reduce the level of unproductive content.



This is the first area where a verified e-mail will berequired to do something – but it’s not going to be the last. In the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out a verified e-mail requirement for various activities across ROBLOX .



And besides, a verified e-mail is a great thing to have –not just to comment (or do the other things where verification will be required); it helps protect your account if you forget your password or have other account issues.



So what are you waiting for? If you haven’t already verifiedyour e-mail, now is a good time to do it. While you’re logged in to your account, go to the “Account” link from any page and add your e-mail address in the “Account Settings” section. You’ll receive an e-mail with a link to click and verify. That’s it!



Thanks for being part of ROBLOX.



-- Brad [chiefjustus]

Sneak Peek: Memorial Day Sale

Happy (upcoming) Memorial Day! We’ll be having a massive sale to celebrate the holiday weekend, and each and every item were voted into the sale by users! We’re going to go over some of the discounted items in this article, but not all of them. There will be several surprise deals that you’ll only be able to find during the sale itself, so make and sure to keep checking out ourcatalog throughout the upcoming week. The Memorial Day sale officially begins Friday, May 24th, and runs all the way through Wednesday, May 29th.

Hats that will become limited:

• Valkyrie Helm
• Sword pack
• Sk9r Boi

Hats that are going back on sale:

Hats already on sale that will be FURTHER discounted:

• Bluesteel Crown
• 8 Ball Headphones
• Mr. Hatbot
• Classic Swordpack Throwback

We also had users vote on their favorite re-textured hats on ROBLOX. The vote was so close, that we decided to choose two of the top ranked hats to become yours to own.

• Bluesteel Bathysphere
• Crimsonwrath, Lord of the Magma

Again, keep yourself tuned in to the Catalog to find these items, and many other surprise items we haven’t mentioned that will go on sale throughout the week!

Home Screen Changes!

Hello readers, over night ROBLOX has changed the Home Screen. Let's see what they've done.







As you can see, we have a new Shout Bar, with a brand new Share button!

As you can see here, we have a brand new Feed, also showing a full-time Report button.

Here we have a brand new welcome screen, with a nice Hello, [Player]!. Along with new words showing Notifications, and the Robux Bonus.

Here we have a brand new Best Friends list, with a big Edit button, clicking it simply leads to the friend list.

And last we have the new Recently Played Games. Not much of a difference, but it looks way better.


What do I think of these changes?


I think they're nice, and they do stand out, when I logged on this morning I instantly knew they were changed. Maybe it's just me, or not. But I think they did a good job on the changes.

Sell Game Passes and Gear in Your Game Today!

ROBLOX has had its own virtual economy since 2007 and, last year, we introduced two new features–Game Passes and Affiliate Gear Sales–that started to close the gap between the economy and building. We promised then that we’d eventually complete the circle and implement the ability for builders to sell items in-game. Today, after a lengthy public test in ROBLOX Battle, we’ve successfully enabled in-game transactions across all games in ROBLOX.

Builders can implement in-game sales by utilizing “MarketplaceService”, a new addition to ROBLOX’s Lua API. This new service features several useful aspects, the main one being the “PromptPurchase” function, which will allow you to prompt players to buy items in your games. Another useful aspect is the “GetProductInfo” function, which will allow you to see various stats of in-game sale items, including a description and cost of the item. We tested this API in ROBLOX Battle in the form of a store, though how you choose to implement the code is entirely your decision.

You could script a store in your game. You could create bots that have the ability to chat with other users about selling gear or items. You could even program a single brick to bring up a catalog of your items as soon as it’s touched. The possibilities are endless.

To make it easy for you to get a start, we’ve developed this model of a vending machine that has all the necessary code needed for you to start selling Game Passes and gear in your game. To start out, it’s worth opening the model in Studio to take a better look.

Here’s how to do it:

• Click “Take one” at the Bloxy Cola Model page
• Open ROBLOX Studio
• Click “View” then click “Toolbox Objects”
• Sort by “Recent Models” to find the vending machine, which should be at the top of that list
• Drag the model into your place
• In your Explorer window, double click the item called “BloxyColaVendingMachine” to access its drop-down menu
• To look at/manipulate the script, double click “Script”

Once you’ve opened the script, you can manipulate the code to attach the “PromptPurchase” function to whatever part or model you’d like.
This is the untouched script using the “PromptPurchase” function:


Though in these examples we’re calling “PromptPurchase” server-side, it also works when called from a “LocalScript” as well.
We’re hoping this gives you a general idea of how to manipulate this new feature. As we stated before, you can go far beyond this with a little scripting knowledge. We encourage builders to take this code and find unique ways to leverage it.

New Feature, Same Rules

All of the current financial rules of ROBLOX apply to the in-game sales as well–selling Game Passes in-game will earn you 70% of the total cost of the pass, while you still get to keep 10% of affiliate gear sales (also known as our Add Gear to Game feature). We’re excited to see how users will leverage this ability inside their virtual worlds, and are eager to see what form factors become popular.

Users under 13 can now chat!

What is it?

ROBLOX is starting a Whitelist Filter for young chatters, it stops these players from seeing certain words or phrases.  They will also be removing the Safechat / Bubblechat settings.

Users under 13 get the Whitelist, which stops them from seeing certain words or phrases.
Users over 14 get the Blacklist, which they can see every word, but can't see swear words.

How does it work?

The Whitelist only works for special words that are chosen for the players under 13 to see, if someone [Or you] types something not on the Whitelist, it will appear as #'s.

Example

Pretend that the word 'Bird' is not on the Whitelist. Your friend will say, 'How's the bird today?', what you will see is, 'How is the #### today?'.

The Whitelist will block personal information, bad language, and profanity.

If there is a word you think should be filtered, email info@roblox.com with the word.

Thanks for reading, and happy chatting!

ROBLOX on a Tax Break?

April 15th can be a rough day–that’s the last day for millions of Americans to scrounge up a heap of documents from the past year and file their (ugh) taxes. With that dreadful day looming on the horizon, we’re declaring a tax holiday this weekend to spread a little financial relief! Starting this Friday, we’re cutting marketplace fees in half, meaning all transactions will be subject to only a 15% fee (as opposed to our normal 30%). What does this mean for users?

A few things. If you’re particularly active in the ROBLOX economy, then this weekend would be an optimal time to sell and/or trade items of all sorts and sizes. Limited items are typically quite costly, so this could save you some big time Robux if you’re looking to sell. The cut will also apply to group store sales, game pass sales, and sales of all types of clothing. (Currency transactions, as always, are not subject to a marketplace fee.) You may be able to trade more effectively, as any amount of Robux added to incentivize any given trade will be taxed at half the usual rate.

In order to manage inflation in the economy while maintaining a stable flow of currency going in and out of our system, ROBLOX takes a cut of all sales made by users. This marketplace fee is necessary to keep our economy running smoothly, but we thought we’d lower that fee by 50% in the spirit of the upcoming Tax Day. So if you’ve been waiting for the right time to sell or trade some of your favorite gear, this upcoming weekend is as good a time as you may ever get!

This event starts April 12th, and runs through the afternoon of the 15th. So log in and sell as much as you can to take advantage of the cut. As always, we’ll keep an eye on the ROBLOX economy to see what sort of interesting (and potentially massive) transactions take place over the weekend. Good luck!

Inbox Error, how to fix it

For the past few days, there has been an error with your inbox, when you get message[s], it remains that they are unread for a few minutes.

I sent an E-Mail to ROBLOX and here is the reply.

"Hello Daniel,

Thank you for contacting us. We are aware of this issue and currently working on it. Please keep checking back with our website for future updates that will resolve this problem. We appreciate your patience.

Thank you."

The problem will soon be fixed.

But it still says I have one unread message..?

Before ROBLOX added the "Mark as Read" button, players could glitch a message so it has no title, meaning you could not open it, so you always had 1 message unread. This happened to me, and as I have many many pages of messages it is impossible to find this messages again, but you get used to it over time.

Now, to fix the error if you do NOT have a glitched message, just wait a few minutes [Up to 10 minutes] and it will be fixed.

If you have any questions, put them in the comments below.

Visit the egg hunt today!

Welcome to the 2013 ROBLOX Egg Hunt! Are you ready for a challenge? We hope so, because collecting each and every one of these eggs will be no small feat — they all behave in very distinct (and sometimes dangerous) manners. Click here to start playing today.

Some eggs only appear in certain parts of the map, some only at certain times. Some eggs attack, some run away. A few eggs require your wit and wisdom to activate, while others even appear far outside the Egg Hunt level (and ROBLOX gameplay, for that matter). We also introduced a brand new feature for this year’s Egg Hunt: some eggs will hatch, leaving you with a different virtual item — rather than the traditional egg hats — that will be added to your ROBLOX inventory. There’s not set date for an egg to hatch, so you’ll have to keep an eye on the status of some of your hatchable eggs.

You've got a LOT of ground to cover.

We don’t want to give away the strategy to acquiring every egg (or the prizes associated with them) just yet — that would ruin the fun! For now, we encourage you to begin exploring the 2013 ROBLOX Egg Hunt level! As always, feel free to take advantage of ROBLOXian knowledge to figure out the trick to each egg. Chat in-game, post in the ROBLOX Contests Forum — which we’ll be taking over for the Egg Hunt — and pay attention to what other users are doing.

We’ve also created some exclusive gear that will aid you in your search for each egg. Let’s go over these egg-cellent (sorry, we had to at least once) tools below.

Common Egg Compass: Following this compass will help you find some of the common eggs.

Rare Egg Compass: Following this compass will help you find some of the rare eggs.

Fabrege Cloner: Equip this gear and select a Fabrege Egg. If someone in the server wins the egg you’ve selected while you’re in the server, you win it too!

Egg Cannon 2013: This should do a good job confusing people. The Egg Cannon shoots decoy eggs, but every one in 20 shots is the real thing! There’s a 30 second cool down between each shot.

Eggdar: This gear will tell you what eggs currently populate the level. Keep an eye on it for rare egg sightings!

We hope you can leverage these items to make your egg hunting experience a little easier because this is by far the most challenging egg hunt we’ve ever created. Also, keep your eye on your social media circles—we’ll be posting insider tips on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Happy hunting!

Check out this awesome Youtube video too!

[Yes, John Shedletsky is hilarious, isn't he?]

Also check in for reviews on eggs, tips on getting eggs, and more!

Egg hats released! #1

Check them out!