Roblox News Is Going under Development

Over the Past Few Days, RONews Magazine wanted to stop copying some News from 

The Official ROBLOX News Blog [www.blog.roblox.com]

We are going under Development and we will be Active on One Purpose: 

Finding Our own news, Not taking news from other.

You might miss news for here for awhile. We Will get new ideas for something. We are Now back in BETA Testing. The Prediction of the end of the Beta Testing will be On 5/2/12.

But you guys can still check out our Blog.

                                                                               

Ceo And Founder, Editor, Graphic Designer, Author, Owner, ROBLOXIAN, Video Director, Video Game Designer (Via Flash), And Web Developer.

If you want to contact me, Please send a Mail to:

Matheus Machado

User Feedback v1

By John Shedletsky - April 20, 2012

In order to prioritize our development pipeline, we posted a blog two weeks ago opening the discussion to our users about their top three requests for ROBLOX.  While we are still carefully reading each reply, we wanted to point out a few exceptional responses, along with our developer feedback, so you can see what we are working on. Below we have selected several great comments from our players. John Shedletsky, ROBLOX’s Creative and Content Lead, provides his response in italics.

Charl3s7: It would be awesome to have a light object that attaches to a brick, and then the brick would emit light.

John: If I were to put together a list of “most-asked for ROBLOX features”, dynamic lighting would definitely be in the top three. ROBLOX’s Lead Graphics Developer, Simon Koslov, has spent a fair amount of time researching this feature. We think we’re converging on a good strategy for adding this functionality. However, at the moment we’re focusing our graphics development effort on allowing all ROBLOX places to have 10x as many parts as they do now.

leolion113: Allow for users to find what rank someone is from an ingame script (E.g. IsInGroup (1337, “Soldier”)).

John: Expanding scripter access to our social APIs from Lua is a very high “bang for the buck” feature. This is something that is simple to implement, but gives place creators a ton of power. As groups become more central to the ROBLOX experience, features like this will become ever more important.

Anynomous: Ability to test your clothes before you buy them, without having to see someone else wears it.

John: ROBLOX Engineer, Ben Tkacheff, is currently working on extensions to the ROBLOX Lua API that will make it much easier to alter characters’ appearances in-game. This will pave the way for a “try before you buy” feature and it will also allow power users to script this for their own game.

toon2: I strongly encourage you at Roblox to take what Simon Kozlov did with his Hack week demo and implement it into the game in some form. Many commenters commented that they were astonished by how much better Roblox looked with his lighting, and were inspired to do new things with it. Secondly, when I saw the video thumbnail on Shedleskey’s SFOTHIV, I hoped that you would soon put it on the site for players to use. Finally, a lot of people had uploaded meshes through ROBLOX Studio into their games. Sure, they made ROBLOX seem less brick-related, but they were inventive. I personally don’t care for it too much, but I’ve noticed it to be a common interest, along with custom animations.

John: Users want better lighting. This has been one of the top three most requested features. Video thumbnails are actually available for players to use right now!

The ROBLOX staff is divided on the issue of whether or not to allow players to upload meshes. Moderation difficulties aside, some of us feel that custom meshes could undermine the ROBLOX aesthetic of “what you see is what you get”.  For instance, large meshes won’t collide as you expect them to. On the other hand, when confronted with this type of choice, we almost always land on the side of giving more power and creative freedom to our game developers, so it’s hard to tell what the future holds here.

Isoclism Developers:  If you click on Record Video, X makes your Body invisible to the camera, Z is to slightly pan the camera to the left, and C is to slightly pan the camera to the right.

John: Better control over the camera for creating cut-scenes is actually something ROBLOX Engineer, Tyler Mullen, has done some work on. I think the biggest feature here is to allow the ROBLOX video recorder to record “under” the game UI, so you can get an unobstructed picture in your videos.

Isoclism Developers: More features in the forums: a. Editing Posts after publishing them
b. Allow for Image Signatures with moderation

John: Upgrading the existing forums is on the Web Team roadmap for 2012.

Isoclism Developers: Add more GUI Fonts. We only have 3 right now.

John: Yes. We agree – more power to content creators.

Isoclism Developers: Allow for removal of some of the Core Gui’s.

John: Yes. Almost all of them should be removable.

Isoclism Developers: Add more Social Layer API’s for Roblox’s Lua Scripting program. Like maybe players can send messages in-game.

John: More social APIs – we agree about that too. I would be concerned with the potential for mass-spam that “send message” functionality would unlock; however I’m sure there are ways to mitigate this, like a quota system, for example.

Due to the mass number of responses, we will continue to post user comments over the next few weeks with our developer feedback.  We do take your comments seriously, and our goal is to incorporate your opinions into ROBLOX.

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Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: April 21, 2012

By Andrew Haak - April 21, 2012

Every week, we’re busy telling the stories behind our platform, our technology, and our place in the gaming and technology industries. For those of you who catch up with ROBLOX over the weekend, the Weekly ROBLOX Roundup collects the best stuff to hit our various avenues of publication in the last week.

Our Effort Against Phishing

With ROBLOX attracting more than 7 million unique visitors a month, we’ve started to see a rise in websites that “phish” for our users’ personal information. We’re taking serious measures to ensure these phishing sites don’t last. Remember: If an offer sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Anytime you enter your ROBLOX account information, check your browser’s address bar to make sure you’re on the real ROBLOX website.

This Week in ROBLOX Tech

We have a comprehensive, automated testing infrastructure, but it wouldn’t be complete without the help of ROBLOX users. This week, Simon Kozlov went in-depth on user testing, from its place in the greater ROBLOX debugging program to the benefits of participating.

Bits and Pieces

We’re also combing through the responses to Your ROBLOX Top-Three List. While we’re a little ways off from a complete summary, we’re starting to address some of the most pertinent feedback. Stay tuned for more.
Lastly, our Content Team’s Base Wars game got some coverage in MMORPG.com. We’ve also published a handful of detailed stories about the game over the last few weeks, in case you need more.


We asked our Facebook fans a simple question this week: What’s the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to you in a ROBLOX game?
You’ve seen some bizarre stuff. You’ve made new friends and ended up in games with ROBLOX celebrities and developers. One Facebook respondent told a quick story, which we’ve copied here and edited for readability:

“I was in a war group; we were in a helicopter flying to a raider base and our boss said, ‘deploy parachutes but don’t jump!’ When we arrived at the raider base he said, ‘Jump! Go go go!’ We parachuted in but were outnumbered by the raiders and the helicopter was shot down. Our next plan was to get in a heavy jeep. It was white and had no windows except in the front. There was a door in the back, our boss was driving. When we arrived again there were only two raiders. We fought them and left for another fort.”

Anti-climactic? Maybe. But it shows the potential ROBLOX has for creating scenarios that are different for every player, every time.

“Packed a house full of C4, then watched it blow up and rain bricks.”

“Playing Sword Fights on the Heights, I fell off a cliff with my sword out and landed on someone on another platform, killing them.”

“I survived a zombie attack with no legs and one arm.”

What are the most interesting things to happen to you in a ROBLOX game? Share your best gameplay stories in the comments, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter to stay in the loop on questions and content you won’t find anywhere else.

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ROBLOX Users: An Essential Part of Our Development Team

By Simon Kozlov - April 19, 2012

We recently explained our extensive testing infrastructure and showed how various systems are checking ROBLOX’s code for errors and regressions at just about all hours of every day.
But get this: that wasn’t the full picture.
ROBLOX also has an experienced community of user testers, who round out our otherwise mechanized testing platform with good, old-fashioned – but no less vital – human interaction, and usually learn a few things in the process.

User testing’s place in ROBLOX

User testing is a cornerstone of ROBLOX’s elaborate testing infrastructure. It pits a release against the widest range of real-life user behavior. It’s the last line of defense before a work-in-progress ROBLOX gets promoted to official, player-facing release.
Before any new version of ROBLOX is released to users at large, we launch it on gametest.roblox.com – an exact replica of the real site, but running on a smaller scale. The extent of a given test depends on the release. While we generally follow the rule of “at least 100 testers over the course of three to seven days,” a minor patch usually doesn’t require the full-bore testing operation.
We notify users when a new test build is available by placing a notice on ROBLOX.com and making an announcement in our official forums. Then, ROBLOX users play games the same way they would on the live site.
That is, until they encounter a problem.

User testing is a two-way street

User testers’ key obligation is to inform us of the problems they encounter with solid information. Screenshots and video are always useful – easily attainable using ROBLOX’s in-game video- and screen-capture tools – but most important are the descriptive, detailed steps we use to reproduce the error. Even seemingly arbitrary details, such as what your character was wearing, are important.

This is good, and the only thing that would have made it better is operating system information. Mac or PC? Windows XP or Windows 7? OS 10.6 or OS 10.7?	There’s a lack of information, here. We’d like to know the operating system, browser and steps we could take to reproduce the error. We don’t know whether it was the build button, the stamper tool or something else that failed.

ROBLOX users can also upload logs of their testing sessions by pressing F8. ROBLOX will record system information and more to help us find and fix bugs.
While users are searching for bugs, we watch our internal metrics – number of crashes, number of thumbnails failed, average time to join and more. For example, this is one of the reports we use:

The report shows what kind of crashes users experienced during the testing, how many people crashed the same way and whether crash happened on the user’s computer or the ROBLOX server. It also shows whether a crash happened for the first time; if so, we have a hint that it was caused by a recent change to ROBLOX.
We often reach out to users for more help. We might ask how, exactly, they got ROBLOX to crash and what they were doing when it crashed. When hunting for a bug, even the smallest detail might be the key to catching it.

Join the user-testing club

This is all fueled by the voluntary participation of ROBLOX users. It begs the question: Why become a tester?
Learn. Testing not only trains the critical-thinking part of your brain, but also gives you insight into the software development process, brings you into a passionate community of ROBLOX users and positions you as a leader in the greater ROBLOX world. In some cases, you’ll get to spend time chatting with ROBLOX developers, who would like to learn more about your bug report.
Early access. The reason you’re testing is to make sure the latest ROBLOX features are ready for prime-time. You see it first and know how it works, so you get the jump on other players and creators.
Rewards. It’s our tradition to give user testers in-game items as a token of appreciation for reporting bugs we missed.
Plus, you rightfully receive the intangible, but unending gratitude of ROBLOX’s developers. We value your time and effort, and do what we can to make it a worthwhile experience.
With an understanding of ROBLOX’s testing infrastructure, the only thing left for you to do is become a contributor. Head over to our Game Test forum and join the conversation, or check out our public testing environment at gametest.roblox.com. Help shape our platform.

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Screen Some Great Video Trailers

By Tim Brown - April 18, 2012

We knew ROBLOX users were capable game designers, but it wasn’t until we launched our media gallery feature that we realized our users are solid cinematographers as well. In the days since we allowed users to begin promoting their games with video, we’ve seen more than 250 submissions, running the gamut from carefully crafted to suitably dramatic to oddly funny.
Look no further than here for some video-trailer inspiration. You might even pick up some useful tips, too.

Perilous Skies

Kool Killer VI: The Final Inception

Freeflight

ROBLOX Chair Racing

Fight 4 Life 2

Survive the End of ROBLOX

And, for a little dry humor to put you in the mood:

Spray Paint the City

For background on submitting videos and images for your game’s media gallery, check out this recent blog post. Or, if you’d like some additional guidance, read through the handy Video Making 101.

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ROBLOX Takes on Phishing Sites

By Taylor Whitmer - April 16, 2012

Phishing has been a problem since the inception of the internet, and in 1995 the term was first coined in a README doc for a popular hacking tool targeting AOL users. Recently, ROBLOX has seen an increase in phishing sites, and we wanted to communicate how we approach these sites. Phishing is a common method of online identity theft, and in our continued effort to make ROBLOX as safe as possible, we will be taking serious measures to ensure the security of our players. ROBLOX will press charges and utilize law enforcement to take down any phishing sites that threaten our site’s security.

What is Phishing?
Phishing attempts to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, or credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity either through email communication or a website. We should also note that phishing is not a ROBLOX-specific issue, but rather it affects major websites on the internet, including sites such as eBay, Amazon, and others. Communications pretending to be from popular social websites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT administrators lure unsuspecting users into providing valuable personal information. Because of this, ROBLOX continually upgrades our security systems, and we police the site to guard against these intrusions. However, everyone should always be aware of providing sensitive information unless you can verify the source.
Does Phishing Violate Federal Criminal Laws?
Because phishing sites utilize false and fraudulent statements to deceive people into disclosing valuable personal data, phishing schemes may violate a variety of federal criminal statutes. In many phishing schemes, the participants may be committing identity theft (18 U.S.C. § 1028(a)(7)), wire fraud (18 U.S.C. § 1343), credit-card (or “access-device”) fraud (18 U.S.C. § 1029), bank fraud (18 U.S.C. § 1344), computer fraud (18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(4)), and the newly enacted criminal offenses in the CAN-SPAM Act (18 U.S.C. § 1037). Phishing may also breach various state statutes on fraud and identity theft.
ROBLOX’s Response to Phishing Schemes
Since security and a great user experience are essential at ROBLOX, we work directly with criminal agencies to pursue and enforce a safe environment. The FBI has a mechanism to report potential phishing schemes, and ROBLOX utilizes this as part of our response. Our players may never hear about these enforcement actions, but be assured that ROBLOX management takes these threats seriously and takes action.
To help our users become more aware of what phishing sites look like, here is an example:

Compare the URL in this screenshot to that of roblox.com, and you can easily see that something is incorrect here.  The bottom line is: any time you enter personal data into a page on the internet, double check the identity of the site you are using.

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