Roblox

Roblox is a free online brick-building MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game). It entered multiplayer alpha in 2006 and was released in full to the public later that year. In Roblox, the player can visit, build, and script Places, using an infinite supply of virtual blocks, and the scripting language Lua 5.1. ROBLOX's name has varied over time, with the first few names "DynaBlox" and "GoBlox". Even then, these domains now redirect back to ROBLOX.

In the summer of 2010, Roblox has said to have upgraded to a new engine called "Ogre".

History and Development
Roblox was founded by David Baszucki, in Silicon Valley, June 2005, based off a physics simulation program David had programmed earlier. Originally, ROBLOX was going to have Legolike figures, but with different features. The picture shows some of the designs. But this was scrapped, because of the figures looking too much like Legos. And he was afraid they could file a lawsuit. There is a blog that shows the designs, and the mesh.

In 2008, Roblox added the Guest feature. Guests always appear the same as the Roblox user, until an update where you wear different hats depending on gender. There have limited abilities. They cannot type in what they want to say in in-game chat. Some use hacks; however, to allow some guests to type in what they want to say. They cannot make places, and they cannot change their appearance. Some people in Roblox hate Guests, and thus have created some well scripted objects that reject them from places.

Game Engine
Roblox is developed with Microsoft Visual C++, and uses libraries such as fmod for audio playback and processing as well as Visual Studio's Windows Forms library for the in-game editor. ROBLOX's physics are processed with an in-house physical engine known as ImPlicitNgine, where as the visuals are rendered on OGRE 1.4.1. Roblox seems to also use the G3D game engine's framework.

On the topic of data, Roblox stores its user-save files in the extensible Markup Language, an easy human-readable encoding, which is actually more commonly seen on the Internet. Due to the markup of XML, these files replaced of all capital letters with lowercase characters in handles for more than half of the users who joined before May 2007.

Appearance
When Players create an account, they have a name and an avatar. When a player chooses a name, it cannot be changed. However, a player's avatar can be. Players always start off with a randomly generated head and body. The user can change the Head, Face, Hat, Shirt, T-Shirt, and Pants of the account by buying new ones from the Catalog with Tickets and Robux.

Players can create some items. Only Builders Club members can sell items they have created. The Catalog has Limited Edition items. These items are created by Roblox, and have a limited supply. Usually, the limited items are either hats, faces or gear. They also have timed items which is an item that only has a certain time limit for players to buy them in and it's usually hats or gear. In addition to their infinite supply of shirts, gear, pants, and more, they also have a body structure change also known as the Packages. The Packages allow the user to become a selected body form which alters the player's appearance significantly. However, Body Parts are only available to Builders Club members.

=Building, Playing and Tools=

Places
Main article: Places Places are virtual worlds, that players can play and build in. When an account is created, each user gets 1 free Place, in which they can build anything, with a unlimited supply of bricks that they can insert, by using the Insert button. The user can choose to have one of three starting templates:

A Happy Home in Robloxia, consisting of a car's main structure, a house (empty), road/ path, and building bricks (starter pack). Starting Brick Battle, consisting of 2 opposing walled towers, two different teams and a baseplate. Players get all of the standard Roblox fighting tools. Empty Baseplate, consisting of a large black brick (black baseplate). The Editor gets Tools and Gear but players must get the usable tools from existing scripts or givers. In many places you will meet many types of people. They will be cool, noobish, odd, fair, angered easily, and even more. Also, you can talk to them and befriend them although some people are kicked out of a place or server because of bad or noobish behavior, name calling, or cussing, cursing, and even more.

Tools and Gear
Main articles: Tools and Gear Tools and Gear are virtual tools that players can use. There is a difference between tools and gear. Tools are items that can manipulate things within the game, including weapons. Gear is a special variety of tool, that is kept by the player from game to game. Many games lock all gear or any gear not in their genre. Generally these are themed games. So if you have Al's Space Adventure in SCI-FI section you probably wont be able to have the midevil brigands saber. However if you have a gear war type game you want to play it will very likely have no gear restrictions at all.

Bodies
The Roblox company is currently making a new type of body for Robloxians. The Bodies are BC-only and were originally stated as 'BC-Beta" (it has been over a year since that was stated). Theses bodies vary, and are often based around holidays or popular contests. Many holiday-related bodies are "limited" and go offsale after the holiday. Examples of these are: Elf, Football player, Action figure and Superhero. Roblox has recently published a "girl" body, the first that can be purchased for free by NBCers. The body is marketed towards girls, still leaving the male NBCers with the standard body. The Robloxian 2.0 body is by far the most popular alternative body to standard blocks, and has unofficially become the standard, often featured in news posts and on the site's logo at the top of the page.

Trivia

 * In the 2000 game Hot Wheels: Micro Racers, the small book tunnel after the last fork in the road in the Office track is called "Living, Hunting on the Internet. The front cover shows a picture of a computer with the ROBLOX 'R' icon displayed on the screen, but this is merely a coincidence.