October 2019 Recap: That's a lot of changes!

Updates Community & Events
#1

Hey developers,

October was full of treats (and no tricks) for the developer community. Let’s look back on how the month went.

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Job Listings

Roblox is hiring! We’re looking for members of our developer community to fill these roles:

  • QA Games Tester (Contract) - apply here.

Live-Ops

We’d like to thank all of the developers who submitted their games for live-ops events during October!

Agents
Blox World
Brick World Theme Park
Construction Simulator
Crafting Simulator
Deathrun
DESERT WORLD Dragon Adventures
Dr. Seuss’ Seuss World :jack_o_lantern:Halloween :jack_o_lantern:
Egg Simulator
Emergency Response: Liberty County
Farm World
Flunkville
Ghost Simulator
Halloween Simulator
Horse World
Insurance Scam Simulator
Military Simulator
Monsters of Etheria
Movie Park
Pinata Simulator
Power Simulator
Seconds Till Death
Sinking Ship
Snow Resort
Star Sorority
The Clown Killings Reborn
Theme Park: ROBLOX Point
Tower Defense Simulator
Treasure Quest

Want your game featured for a live-ops event? Read all about how here: Roblox 2019 Events Update

Updates and Changes

There’s a new type of Medium article in town! :cowboy_hat_face:

Okay, so this one isn’t new, but we’re still looking for new content to publish on our Medium publication. We want you to work with us to write in-depth, technical articles about game development on Roblox. Read the announcement for more info and a link to apply with a technical topic you’d like to write about!

Part Surface Changes

We’re making some changes to the way Part Surfaces work. Check out the announcement to learn what’s changing!

GUI Border Mode

We’ve released BorderMode, allowing you to customize GUI border rendering. Read the announcement to learn about the three modes currently offered.

Introducing the Translator Portal

Exciting news for localization - we now have a portal that allows you to keep track of translation progress for designated languages, download translator reports, and access all games where you’ve been given translator permissions. Check out the announcement for more details!

Further Respawn Improvements

Rejoice, developers, for the days of spawning on top of slightly lower ceilings are gone! Look at what’s changed with respawning in that announcement.

Keyframes Animate Everything Around Me

A complete overhaul of the Studio animation editor! Incredible. The announcement has a full rundown of everything new and improved.

Terrain Cylinders, Perfect Flatness, and a Fresh New Look

We worked tirelessly to bring awesome updates to the Terrain Editor tool - including a new brush shape and the ability to create perfectly flat terrain. Check out the announcement!

Sound script changes

The character sound system has been entirely rewritten for improved server performance. Get the juicy details in the announcement post!

Changes to Player List Icons

We made some quality of life changes to the player list to make it look prettier. Psst, the announcement has some spoilers about the future of the player list!

Tier-less cash outs are here! :tada:

The big one. We got rid of the tiers of DevEx, so now you can cash out any amount you want over R$100,000. WHEW! Celebrate with us in the announcement!

Release Notes

Yay, numbers!

I told you that October would be exciting. Look what happened: No more DevEx tiers, Animation Editor overhaul, and updates to the Terrain Editor! I wonder what November has in store for the developer community.

Thanks,
Developer Relations

102 Likes
#2

Loving all of the new changes, can’t wait to see the DevEx system progress.

21 Likes
#3

Can’t wait for more updates to come. Super cool!

3 Likes
#4

By FAR my most favorite update!

4 Likes
#6

Glad to see all of the changes that happened in the month of October this year. Can’t wait to see more improvements.

3 Likes
#7

please fix the avatar importer and make a video tutorial, i really wanna start using it. making my rigs in blender is 10x better than making it in roblox studio.

2 Likes
#8

Does the “QA Games Tester” refer to the Quality Assurance Full-member Discord/thing that was going on for a while?

4 Likes
#9

I don’t know if this is a part of a recap but there are 3 new Community PostApproval Members.

Welcome @colbert2677, @railworks2, and @Mullets_Gavin.

10 Likes
#10

No, this is a title for a paid position at Roblox. This is not related to the QA Testers of Robloxia group/program.

7 Likes
#11

Yeah I’m confused about this as well. A contract will be used so does that mean this position will be payed?

Since coefficient answered my question as I posted it, I have one more question. Does this position require working in-person at the Roblox HQ or will you be able to work from home?

4 Likes
#12

This position is an in-person job at the Roblox office in San Mateo, CA.

7 Likes
#13

Anorher month of great updates, however, is there any update on the procedurally generated grass feature that was announced in this year’s RDC?

3 Likes
#14

I love all the great changes, however I would like it if someone would update the 2019 Roadmap, it still shows the 3rd quarter items as ‘On Track’

1 Like
#15

Awesome, loving these updates! :heart_eyes:

1 Like
#16

Ah! Shame, shame. I was taking a midday nap as a result of a terrible sleeping schedule and ended up missing the recap by 2 hours. I don’t know if my retrospective will be that visible due to proceeding replies as well, but matter not! It is time to get the run down going, as is a monthly tradition for me.

In the September Recap, we were promised that October was a month to be looking forward to and joy did October live up to that promise. There have been a lot of great strides this month and I’m absolutely excited about the future to come.

DevForum - New Post Approvers & A Personal Brief

As mentioned by @ColdCrazyGoku above, there are now three new members of the Post Approval team, myself being one of them. Cheers! I’d like to talk a bit about that and about myself in general. Some stuff I want to get out there, since I’m typically known to be a reserved person.

To be honest, I have never seen myself ever going anywhere on the platform, even on the DevForum. I use those huge spare pockets of time to post some on the DevForum and I really do enjoy helping people out. It makes me feel that I can make others’ games progress wherein there is a lack of any content being produced from me (which I want to change soon!).

There are a lot of things I had never expected since my invitation in 2017 to the DevForum, with respect to the lack of productivity since my joining of the platform in 2010. Being able to join the QA Testers program as an NDA Verified tester, being selected as one of the new Top Contributors during the program reform and now joining Community Post Approval. I’d like to take pride in those achievements since I hold them very near and dear to me.

One thing I don’t particularly like is complacency. When I was selected as a Top Contributor for the start of the new cycle, I said that I was fine where I was and didn’t really have any plans to go higher. This was also the case when I thought that PA would be a real hassle after, well, hearing a few stories. Truth is, now that I’m here, I realise that I was never satisfied with just Top Contributor and I did want to move higher. That hasn’t stopped. I have my sights set on becoming a Community Sage, haha.

On the note of wanting to reach higher heights, I have also decided that sometime soon it will be time to start taking development seriously and be productive. I’ve been sitting around for a little too long without much productivity or progress in my passion. So, my aim is to release some projects and update old ones between now and December, then go from there. I currently only develop for roleplay groups, but I’m also thinking now about releasing my own game projects. :sunglasses:

2019 has been a big year of realisation and change for me; change about my level of involvement on the platform and change about myself outside of Roblox. This journey has been a wild ride but I am committed to making it better for myself and hopefully for others. Thank you to those who’ve supported me, helped me learn new things over the years and given me the chance to come back from admittedly cursed moderations almost nothing. I am truly grateful. :tada:

LiveOps

Once again, congratulations to all of those who have been featured in the LiveOps programs.

I think that my perspective of LiveOps has changed over time. I’m still quite upset about the removal of Roblox Events, me being a big person of tradition and nostalgia, but I figured that they would start being phased out once events starting being hosted on user games over being developed by Roblox.

I think that LiveOps, completely contrary to my initial stance, is a good utility because it gives your game a space to get advertised for virtually no cost. It’s effectiveness of course relies on how often the page is up or how the game gets across to other users, but I can see it’s strong worth for start-ups with little funding to roll with to start up semi-organic growth.

Hoping to appear on this page one day. :slightly_smiling_face:

Updates and Changes

Roblox absolutely killed it with updates this month. I’m still looking forward to items being picked off of the High-Level Platform Roadmap since I’m excited for almost every single item, but the updates we’ve gotten between are just as amazing.

Out of the list of updates currently present on the thread, I have a single favourite update: Sound script changes. Anyone remember the absolute frustration that would come out of working with the Sound script and seeing the console spam? Anyone just generally didn’t like how the Sound script worked? Nope, nope, out the window. Goodbye to those problems! They will not be missed!

The new Sound script not only gives sound control to clients which prevents exploitability in nearly every regard (changes only take effect on the client), but there is zero network traffic or server involvement with this new code. Pure client-sided greatness. It also, for those of you who are fork- or browse-savvy, encourages a certain style of coding where you in fact can push the work to the client instead of making the server bear the brunt of everything. The source is worth a scroll-through.

Release Notes

In addition to Updates and Changes, the Release Notes happened to reveal a lot of awesome updates without dedicated announcements. For those of you interested in the advancement of the platform, keeping up to date with every single Release Notes is worth it to prepare for or incorporate new features. Here are some of my highlights from each (if there are none, no section for it).

Release Notes 400

  • UDim2.fromOffset and UDim2.fromScale: For the lazy, a gift descends. Judging by its addition as a constructor (but is not yet documented), I believe these are intended to be like UDim2.new but only using two values. The other ones are automatically filled in for you.

Release Notes 407

  • table.create / table.find: Hooray for more array-based functionality! After learning a certain technique and implementation detail about tables from a friend, I started creating tables with placeholder elements to help with size allocation as well as reducing expense. Probably overkill but… :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Release Notes 408

  • Attributes: Although it only allows pure-data, thank you for allowing us to natively expand upon Roblox instances without the need to wrap or create custom implementations. I understand those will still be necessary for non-primitives excluding functions and userdata, but that’s fine.

And that’s it.

We were definitely told that October would be exciting and oh my did it live up. I’d like to offer a big thanks to the Roblox team for providing us with all these wonderful tools and to Developer Relations for, as always, updating us on the latest.

:tada:

19 Likes
#17

I have to say, the tier less cash outs has to be my favorite update of October!(yet all others are good too :smile: )

5 Likes
#18

Is there no potential for remote working?
This seems right up my street but I’m not ready for various reasons to move to California.

5 Likes
#19

It doesn’t seem like remote opportunities will be available for that position at this time.

4 Likes
#20

Alright, thanks for the update. That’s really unfortunate to hear but understandable. If that changes, I would love to hear about that. If not, there’s always next time.

4 Likes
#21

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