RDC24: What We Announced


Hi, It’s Nick and Tian reporting to you live from the Roblox Developers Conference (RDC)! We’re bringing you an update on all of the announcements today and also want to celebrate… you!

Since last year’s RDC, you posted more than 50K times in the Help and Feedback section of DevForum to help each other work through creation challenges and questions. You also assisted with Roblox Inspire, and more than 25K creators joined to learn from each other. You all continue to inspire and motivate us every day!

Now, let’s dive into the updates.

Building A Rock-Solid Platform

This year, we’ve been laser-focused on hardening the platform – making it rock solid. This starts with bugs, and we’ve closed more than 3,300 in the twelve months ended June 30, 2024, and squashed 4X the number of Studio bugs compared to the prior year.

Some of the notable improvements to Studio performance and stability are:

  • Reduced Studio hangs by 60% since the beginning of the year 1

  • Decreased place open times for 90% of Studio users by 33% on average 2

  • Made play-testing faster for 90% of Studio users by 48% on average 3

We want to enable you to host a high-performance, 100-player battle royale or sports game and have them run on low-end 2GB Android devices anywhere in the world at the highest frame rates possible. Here are some of the performance wins we showed at RDC24:

  • Announced our Harmony architecture

    • Harmony is our next-gen scaling tech that predictively orchestrates resources and coordinates across the entire engine to make choices to anticipate occurrences like crashes and stop them from happening.

    • We’ve been rolling out Harmony behind the scenes, and we’re seeing a 21% decrease in out-of-memory crashes on low-end Android phones.

  • Started testing automatic occlusion culling with select experiences

    • Occlusion culling automatically increases frame rate by not drawing most things that another object would hide.

    • Based on initial testing, we see a 35% reduction in rendering time on our slowest devices from automatic occlusion culling. Occlusion culling allows you to build richer worlds while maintaining high performance and a great user experience.

  • RCC memory change

    • Historically, whether you built an experience with one person or 100, we gave you 6.4GB of memory on the server.

    • We want to give you more server resources to build with, so this week, we’ve moved to a new dynamic memory allocation that starts at 6.4GB and adds 50MB per player who joins your experience.

At the end of the day, performance, stability, and quality are foundational to everything we do at Roblox. We see this work, from reducing crash rate to improving framerate, resulting in increased playtime. Better performance means better user experience and more engagement for your experiences.

Fitting Your Workflows

We want to build tools that solve your use cases and scale with you as you grow in ambition, vision, and team size.

Better tools for management, collaboration, visibility, and testing

We announced a completely revamped Asset Manager (Late 2024) with the ability to organize your assets with folders and labels, and enhanced search across all your accounts and groups. We’re improving collaboration and visibility with the Experience Activity, which launched last week, and are planning to launch Comments and Annotations (Late 2024).

Preview of the upcoming Asset Manager UI

We also announced that you can soon run Luau in the cloud using our upcoming Open Cloud Engine API for executing Luau (Late 2024). For instance, you can integrate with GitHub Actions to run automated tests.

Example of how to run automated tests using upcoming Open Cloud Engine API for Executing Luau

Insights to optimize your experience engagement, avatar, and performance

Earlier this week, we launched breakdowns for your server performance dashboards in Analytics and more analytics to help you optimize low-end Android performance. You can break down your server memory and CPU usage by engine categories. Later this year, we’ll ship custom analytics events and detailed analytics for avatar items.

We also recently shipped new visualizations for new X-ray mode and summary :fire:flame graphs​:fire: for Microprofiler. X-ray mode gets brighter in intensity when a memory allocation hotspot is located, and the summary flame graph helps highlight tasks that by themselves may not be expensive but called frequently enough may be a real drag on performance.

Example Flamegraph

Accelerated Creation

Taking Studio to the Next Level

We want to help you go faster by making things more intuitive, eliminating or helping automate mundane tasks, and freeing you to work on what matters for your experience. That’s why we have already rolled out the beta of the next gen Studio UI, brand new templates, and are working on ways to allow for community-generated templates in Studio (Late 2024) to help you get started faster.

Preview of community-generated templates in Studio

Improved Data Stores

One of the things we’ve heard time and time again is that data stores need an upgrade. Having to prevent concurrent writes, handle failures, and ensure consistency is a lot of work and hard to learn.

So we’re working on updating Data Stores (Late 2024) to handle some of the challenges you’ve been managing, defining standardized schemas and high-level APIs for common use cases like player inventories, stats, live ops, and more. We will also plan to handle session locking and retry logic for you automatically. Lastly, we’re planning a Data Store explorer so you can easily find and edit keys for debugging or customer support.

More Control over Avatars in Your Experience

We are working on giving you more control over the avatars in your experiences (Early 2025). You’ll be able to control the scaling and hitboxes, preventing you from needing to maintain custom allow/deny lists for unique avatar items.

Preview: Giving you more control over avatars in your experience

Fun and Inspiring

Over the past year, you’ve created so many fun and inspiring experiences. Your creativity, ingenuity, and unique sense of humor amaze us. We want to give you more tools to make the platform fun for everyone by connecting global audiences, allowing for novel forms of expression, and helping you match players in competitive experiences.

Translation

We’ve been working hard the past year shipping translation products like chat translations, translations for non-English experiences, and translation feedback. In June 2024 alone, we estimate we translated more than 17.5B chat messages. We heard that you need even more flexibility for translation, especially if you have experience relying on dynamic or user-generated content. We’re working on a real-time translation API (Late 2024) that will allow you to send content to us, and we’ll send it back to you translated in real time. We also plan to help you translate your thumbnails and icons (Late 2024).

New Tools For Storytelling and Voice Commands

We showcased two exciting new ways to express your creativity in experience. The first is Text to Speech (Early 2025), which lets you unlock new types of content and narrative styles. You can easily add narration, speaking NPCs, or speaking captions in experiences. Here’s an inspirational video we created working with the ClipIt team that shows off this upcoming feature.

The next is Speech to Text (Early 2025), which allows you to create voice commands. Here’s a cool demo by GregTame envisioning what voice commands could look and feel like.

Custom Matchmaking

For creators of competitive games, it can be challenging to build an experience that works well for noobs and veterans. It’s no fun for your newer players if they get fragged as soon as they join your experience. So we will launch Custom Matchmaking (Early 2025), allowing you to define matchmaking rules to group users by skill level or preferred experience mode (e.g., team play vs. individual) or any attribute you decide.

Example of Custom Matchmaking

Scaling Creation

Earlier today, we shared some early demonstrations from an incubation project we launched a few months ago with a team of researchers and engineers at Roblox. Their task is to develop a 3D Foundational Model that will efficiently power generative 3D creation on our platform.

The model will be open source, multimodal and capable of powering 3D scene creation through text, video, and 3D assets prompts. When we integrate the model into our systems, we plan to make it available within your experiences and via Studio. We imagine a powerful future where Roblox creators have extensive generative AI to power real-time creation and more complex and innovative gameplay.

Helping You Build Your Business

We want to help you benefit from a larger audience and more opportunities to earn. Today, we announced Price Optimization, a recommendation tool to help you determine the optimal pricing for the products and passes you sell in your experiences. We also announced that in the first quarter of 2025, we’ll enable eligible creators to sell their physical merchandise directly within their experience.

New Revenue Share for Paid Access $9.99+

We’re adding the ability to price paid access experiences in real currency on desktop. We plan to support a higher revenue share for these paid access experiences. For instance:

  • A $9.994 USD-priced experience can receive a 50% revenue share.

  • A $29.994 USD-priced experience can receive a 60% revenue share.

  • A $49.994 USD-priced experience can receive a 70% revenue share.

We’ll roll this out on desktop for users to purchase in their local currency at first, with plans to expand to other supported devices. This update is an addition to how paid access experiences exist today. Which means we will still support paid access experiences paid and earned in Robux.

Commerce

Early next year, we’ll enable eligible creators to sell physical merchandise within their experiences. We plan to integrate with various e-commerce platforms, and are excited to announce our first partnership with Shopify. This means that creators who sell physical goods with Shopify will be able to sell those same products in a Roblox experience. We’ll pilot this solution later this year with a handful of creators, brands, and e-commerce partners.

Creator Affiliate Program

We’re launching an affiliate program that rewards you for new users they bring to Roblox. You can earn a share of the Robux purchased on our platform. This is a pilot program: We will begin accepting applications for the first version starting today, with the aim of expanding this to all creators by mid-2025. We’ll be sharing more details on DevForum next week.

Partner Program

Alongside the growing number of collaborations between you and brands, we’ve consistently heard about the growing opportunity for us to help you connect with one another. For brands, this means finding creator studios to partner with on integrations, ads, custom builds, and creating avatar items based on specific qualifications and expertise. In January, we will be expanding the Roblox Partner Program to new members. Here we shared clear criteria on how to be part of the program and earn official badges…

Bringing People Together

Party

Later this year, we’re rolling out Party, which will enable friends aged 9 and older to seamlessly group up, discover, and join their favorite experiences together. Party will also let friend groups communicate via text and voice within and outside Roblox experiences. Early next year, we’ll release an API to let you see when people are in a Party in your experience, which will open up new ways to make experiences more social and engaging. You can place Party members onto the same team with a visual treatment (i.e., red vs. blue team) or teleport them all to the same starting location.

Example of hosting a party with friends

Groups Becoming Communities

We’re pleased to announce that Roblox Groups, which allows creators and users to form communities with people who share similar interests on the platform, is becoming Communities to reflect the expanding toolset we’re building for creators to connect with their audiences — like Announcements and Events - and reinforce our commitment to enabling our all-ages communities to connect directly on the platform. Expected later in 2024 in Communities, we’re releasing Forums — a dedicated space where users can share feedback, discuss gameplay, and report issues found.

Example Forum Post

Music

Starting today, we’re adding a vast library of new music to the Creator Store with our DistroKid integration, with more coming later this year. For creators that own the rights to their music, next month, we’ll add the ability to upload your music via Distrokid. By the end of this year, we expect to see the catalog of music on Roblox that grows to span across genres like electronic, pop, dance, rock, country, and rap/hip hop. In the upcoming months, we’re adding new platform-level features like What’s Playing and Music Charts, where people can find popular and trending experiences or songs from breakout artists across the Roblox community.

Check out the video below showcasing some of the new music coming today featuring The Strange Ones and The Holy Knives with contributions by the TTD3 and ClipIt teams.


We’re excited to share these updates with you and can’t wait to hear your feedback. We will update the Creator Roadmap shortly so you can keep track of when some of these products will launch.

Footnotes

1. Decrease YTD as of August 31, 2024
2. Based on a comparison between the last RDC and June 30, 2024
3. YTD improvement through June 30, 2024
4. Purchased on desktop, in real currency

391 Likes

This topic was automatically opened after 10 minutes.

Love these changes! Looking forward to them very soon.

52 Likes

I love the speech to text, I can see so many uses for it!

56 Likes

Still no Discord intergration… sigh…

86 Likes

Damn, the new studio UI looks kinda good.
I also loved the voice command feature and Luau on GH Actions!

38 Likes

Most of this stuff I found useless, just AI slop and some text to speech thing. Also i though you guys were done with metaverse stuff…

I expected new materials not roblox becoming snapchat…

About the usd game update, I don’t think it fits roblox at all. Like most games will 100% flop if they use that. Most games that are above 25 robux often flop. But again most games are free.

Honestly I found nothing that I would like or use this year. :frowning: Hope that changes next year.

42 Likes

Roblox releasing some good stuff! :smile:
Good work to the Engineers behind it!

I most notably like how Roblox is creating new programs to help creators climb to the top, and as well as finally focusing on the old studio user interface and updating it!

Really nothing else to say, just overall great content imo,
Amazing work Roblox…

23 Likes

I get this after staying in CaC (catalog avatar creator) [and other games too ofc] for too long. Great to see it

LFG

not sure how i feel about the new UI. I just hope there’s an option to keep the old interface, which i had just started getting used to

Was hoping this wouldnt happen, but i guess it’s not TERRIBLE.

16 Likes

omg this is insane ! , these new updating are amazing , but i was looking for the full release of ads manager and improvements to sponsored ads and moderation fixs , and why music on roblox this is not spotify ! , after every thing these changes are Amazing .

10 Likes

Loving the updates! Especially the Shopify partnership & The Cloud Engine API for luau language

8 Likes

Is there an update on if UI styling is still planned to release in late 2024?

10 Likes

So many new features announced today that I absolutely can’t wait for. I’m really excited to see what happens next on the platform!

7 Likes

The UI I’m seeing looks way to simplified for me, is there gonna be an option to make detailed views pop up, or perhaps stay in the old UI?

9 Likes

I love this, one thing I would REALLY love to see is a way to upload music to Roblox and people having to pay for rights. This would allow for new ways to grow a community and would allow other creators on other platforms then distrokid to hop on the train.

11 Likes

Really excited to see some of the stuff that people do with the speech to text, that’s just absolutely amazing.

In regards to the voice chat in Parties, what kind of control will developers have over this? I could see this potentially being an issue with games that rely on Spatial Voice as a game play feature if developers aren’t able to manipulate when players can hear each other.

9 Likes

True - i was looking for the full release of ads manager and improvements to sponsored ads and moderation fixs , and why music on roblox this is not spotify ! ,

also is there ANY word on that “genre” update leak date?? that seems like the most important thing that has 0 mention?

9 Likes

Is that Table of Content manually generated or a Forum Feature?

10 Likes

There’s really only one mention of AI in this post and its not even slop lmao

Yes, technological innovations = metaverse

This game already exists and the partnership with DistroKid is great in my opinion, it opens up a bunch of new possibilities for ambience.

A lot of these are great additions, stop being so pessimistic! :upside_down_face:

17 Likes

I mean ever since they added skibidi toilet in the classic, i don’t expect anything good from roblox anymore.

9 Likes