October Recap: Here's Whats Happening in the Developer Community

Updates Community & Events
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One of our favorite months at Roblox has come to a close, and with it, we have another Halloween in the books! If you missed September’s recap, you can check it outhere: September Recap: Everything You Need to Know About Last Month in the Developer Community.

This month was particularly busy for Roblox, with the Hallow’s Eve game launching in mid-October, and Rthro scaling enabled on October 22nd. With all of these new changes, we don’t want you to miss anything! Check out this monthly recap we’ve compiled to make sure you don’t miss any of the remarkable events and features that shipped this month:

Events

This month, Roblox hosted it’s annual Halloween game, Hallow’s Eve! Explore the sinister swamp, Halloween games and secret worlds here: Roblox

Developer Content: From the Devs and Developer Spotlights

At the beginning of October, we decided to switch up the way that we do developer content. Previously, the Developer Relations team would invite developers to submit content for the Roblox Developer Medium. However, we decided to open this opportunity to more developers and allow developers to submit content to be published on Medium! You can see the invitation here: Opportunity for Developer-Written Content Promotion!

This month was the first month where we published content from this open application. Check out the content that your fellow developers wrote!:

Interested in submitting content to be published on the Roblox Developer Medium publication? Keep an eye on the Forum for the next topic, which will be coming in early December!

You’ve also likely seen a few more Developer and Featured Game Spotlights on the Developer Forum! These are intended to highlight the work of different developers from the Forum. Check out this month’s Developer Spotlights here:

Updates and Changes:

This month was busy for the Roblox Product and Engineering teams. While there were numerous updates and changes shipped, a major release is the unlocking of full avatar scaling. Where players and developers could previously only unlock to 30% scaling, developers can now choose whether to allow fully scaled (100%) Rthro characters into their games. You can read the full announcement and details of this update here: Announcing Unlocked Avatar Scaling: Expanding the Roblox Universe and the event page here: Roblox

Another significant change coming to Roblox is our Future Is Bright project. Phase 1 of Future Is Bright introduces the new voxel engine (examples below). You can look forward to phase 2 and phase 3 in the coming months! Read more about it here: Future Is Bright: Phase 1 - Studio beta

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Below is a list of all of the other features and changes that have shipped over the past month. Be sure to review and make sure you didn’t miss anything!

Release Notes

Featured Game Updates

You can check out the Featured Games sorts here:

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November 2018 Recap: Keeping Up With the Developer Community
December Recap: What's Happening in the Developer Community
#2

Thanks again for the opportunity to write a Medium article, it was a great experience! On another note, i’m extremely excited for FIB!

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#3

October has been an extremely packed month for the developer community. We’ve been seeing a massive surge of updates, spotlights, features and much more from Developer Relations, Engineers, Staff and all developers in general. Dare I say October was even more packed than last month? Yes I dare say so.

So this year, we got our Annual Halloween event! Although I wasn’t exactly the most giddy about winning any prizes this year, the team in charge of making this year’s Halloween event was very dedicated in producing a great project. I particularly loved the aesthetic feel that the game gave me - it was well detailed and captivating in many different senses of the word. Good job to that team!

More From the Devs articles are out! I still haven’t read all of them, but judging from the topics alone I can already tell that there’s been more informative articles dropping that I should give a read sometime soon. It’s nice to see that developers are taking up the opportunity to write articles and give us more knowledge and insight to various topics. Thank you to all authors of current Medium articles and to those who plan to be writing in the future!

Now, the updates. The updates, always the best part to look forward to for the month. It’s always amazing to see how Roblox developers take advantage of the platform and the tools provided to them to spice up their games and give players a better experience. It’s moreso amazing that the engineering team are able to deliver when it comes to updates and they can’t be thanked enough for it. So, my favorites:

  • Rthro & Unlocked Scaling: Various custom implementations of Anthro avatars existed before Rthro was dropped, which in itself was really cool to see. Roblox is now coming out with their own Anthro avatars available to the public. I know a lot of people have been displeased with Rthro in general but let’s be honest here: the version of Rthro that was released is far better than what was originally planned and you can’t harp on extended customization options. R6 and R15 will still be alive and kicking on the platform for a long time and that was even clarified to us by Roblox Staff. Nonetheless, players and developers alike have yet more options to work with and developers even have further control over the avatars in their games. All in all, I say this was well worth it.
  • Future is Bright: This month, we all got our first taste at FIB with the release of Lighting.Technology. Although it’s not yet applicable in-game, this gives us a bit of time in advance to play around with our games and get them ready to use FIB the moment it moves to its next phases. This was undoubtedly one of the more hyped and big updates. It’s going to be pretty amazing to see places absolutely transformed. I assume that showcases will also be making use of FIB to enhance the environment. One thing though - I’d like to see a horror game making use of FIB. I’ve seen a lot of showcases, city games, facilities and whatnot using FIB, but I haven’t seen a horror game use it yet. I wonder how much scarier a game could get if you amp up the lighting.
  • Three Strikes of Moderation: I think this was well needed. The existence of this in itself heavily discourages any bad behaviour on the DevForum and organizes moderation in a more concrete mannerism. I don’t have much to say about this, only that I appreciate it for being made.
  • Analytics: I’m still sitting here, waiting for the New Analytics options to be rolled out to the public. A real shame that I’m not into serious developing right now and am more conditioned to group-related work (didn’t score Top 1000 in Gameplay Time), but a friend of mine who does have access to this feature showed me some stats from his game using this feature and it looks very helpful for tracking stats individually and more precisely.
  • Sunsetting Sets: Sets became less and less used as time went on. Though they were a great tool for tracking assets in the past, they visibly made themselves obsolete. I don’t use sets myself that often or at all, except for a few which contain some assets I may want to use in the future. Rest in peace, sets. Thank you for your help in the past.
  • Increased polygon limit for CSG and Mesh parts: Who couldn’t love this update? I’m sure many builders were tired of getting that one error, “your union exceeds limits”. Lifting this limit means that we’ll be seeing possibly higher quality or more detailed unions. Builders can work with less of those errors and overall everyone seems to be content about it. Less errors, more building. Bring it on.
  • Reconnect to Game, Improved Join and Teleport errors: YES. I did not like that red topbar at all. I know that the issue seems to have meddled with a few games that had funky ways of handling shutdowns (in the thread itself, there’s a picture in which a custom screen is shown on shutdown), but this is the top of the cake. Players actually have the ability to retry joining a server now or closing it off a UI instead of just seeing a message. Off-topic remark: while I find this update very useful to players and developers alike (anyone remember Soft Shutdowns?), what I really want is that UI blur mask. The current blur effect only blurs the 3D View and anything in the workspace, but this UI blurs out everything - Workspace and UIs alike - so only it can be displayed. This may spark me to write a feature request to have it unlocked, if not already - who knows? I just want that blur mask.

Now, the real deal is seeing whether November can top off October. October has definitely had quite a bit to keep up with, but I’m hoping November will be the same way, or at least reach around the same heap of content that October hit. Here’s to hoping for another goodies-packed month and to hearing more about what’s up in the developer community.

Welcome to November.

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