Roblox Developers Conference 2019

The Roblox Developers Conference 2019 is an annual event that took place from August 9 to 11, 2019 in San Francisco, California. Key portions of the event, including keynotes and sessions were streamed live. Unlike the predecessing year, the UK conference is a "private-viewing party where international developers can mingle and watch live video content from RDC 2019." Content frequently includes game and platform updates, networking opportunities with major developers, and game-building events. This viewing party took place in London. Roblox hinted at other international locations, though none are officially announced.

Goodie Bag/Swag items

 * Drawstring bag itself
 * Notebook
 * Mug
 * Bloxy Cola
 * Wireless charging pad
 * Beanie
 * RDC 2019 sticker
 * Roblox Dev patch

David Baszucki's Keynote Address
David Baszucki (David.baszucki/), the Chief Executive Officer of Roblox, first presented about the state of Roblox. Additional features and projects were announced during this keynote address.

Announced upcoming features include up to 600 players per server without additional costs, simultaneous collaboration with up to 100 people in Roblox Studio, and a User-Generated-Content (UGC) catalog.

2023 estimations
"Our new internal mission is, at some point, in one of these next few years, to have our developer community in sum earn over a billion dollars from the Roblox platform, and that's our new goal. And we think we're going to hit it some day."

- David Baszucki

Justin Sousa ()
"So seriously, look around at all your allies, all your teammates, everyone around you, and realize: This is your future company, this is your future teammates, this is everyone who can help build the imagination platform of tomorrow."

- Justin Sousa

Justin Sousa, the head of the developer community, introduced information about the community of Roblox. Highlights include:

Adam Miller (): A year in Review
Adam Miller introduced:

Year in Review, Year Coming Up
What we promised we'd ship (and did):
 * Packages: Make it once, re-use it everywhere. Can be made out of anything.
 * Power Studio Tools: Accurate Play Solo, Bulk Import, Mesh Splitting
 * Productivity: Beta Features (sneak peek, provide feedback, co-create the future of Studio), Cloud Saved Games (build and test in the cloud before you publish, never lose anything), Game Archiving (declutter Studio)
 * Real-Time CSG: Server API to Union and Subtract parts and CSG in-game, fast enough for simple things.
 * Level of Detail &mdash; CSG and Mesh Parts: Automatically compute levels of detail with RenderFidelity set to Automatic, lower triangle count and improved rendering performance for distant objects.
 * Physical Solver - LDL Decomposition: improved stability and fidelity of systems using mechanical joints, reduced errors, much-improved behavior with complex machines.
 * Forcefield material: Allows to simulate forcefield like effects, transparency driven by fresnel and vertex color and texture-based animations
 * Humanoid platforms: Stability for s on moving platforms, multi-crew ships, joyrides, works by default.
 * New pathfinding: New agent parameters (AgentWidth, AgentHeight, AgentCanJump), new event (.Blocked)
 * Future is Bright: Three major phases planned: Phase 1 - HDR and linear lighting (shipped), Phase 2 - Dynamic sun shadows (shipped), Phase 3 - Dynamic local light shadows (shipping in 2020)
 * Cross-server messaging: Communicate between servers, simple pub/sub model, enabled the following use cases: Matchmaking, real-time global marketplace, cross-server characters and chat.

What wasn't promised but shipped anyways:
 * Faster Game Loading: optimization, more than 75% reduction load time
 * New Lua VM: Lua interpreter written from scratch, 2-3x speedup, shipped more performance for API calls.
 * More Game Servers/More Concurrency: Massive growth in-game server capacity, tens of thousands of CPU cores added over the last year.
 * Faster Game Engine and Servers
 * : Add 3D elements to UI in games or in plugins
 * Top Dev Metrics: Downloadable monthly report containing, D1, D7, W1 retention, monetization, top countries for your game

What we promised we'd ship but didn't:
 * Dynamic Skies: Beautiful animated skies and clouds, atmospheric scattering, procedural clouds, cloud lighting, different cloud types, all generated from elegant, simple settings.
 * Server Blocks: An attempt to simplify client-server messaging. Problems: upvalues, serverevent/serverfunction keywords weren't scoped, server-code couldn't preserve any state.

What's coming up next year:
 * Big Idea: Large, Immersive Worlds: Bigger scale, more players, better detail and rendering.
 * Level of detail: Model: Works with the existing streaming system, lightweight mesh shown for models that aren't fully streamed in, automatic
 * New lighting model: Metals, more physically correct specular reflection, image-based lighting. Custom materials, environment reflections, mesh material
 * Terrain Vegetation: Procedural terrain decoration, large-scale and efficient, "small" objects like grass, rocks, etc.
 * New Lua Type System: New static typing system similar to how Typescript extends Javascript, robust type-interface system, warn on incorrect 'self' usage, later: a broad array of compile-time warnings and static types in Lua.
 * Team Create with Source Control: Scripts are never locked for editing, for anyone. Versioning for objects, who changed what and when. Rollback to any version, no more broken games. Diff and merge between versions. Make changes, test them, and commit when ready.
 * New Avatars: Skinned characters, material support, clothing that can be layered, fully customizable character controller and state machine, avatar editor integrated with catalog.
 * UGC Catalog: Catalog opening up to creators, build, upload, price, and sell. Tools for creators to manage their catalog assets. Optimized catalog search and discovery. Efficient and fair deduplication of clothing.

Game Jam Announcement
The Game Jam instructional video was shown at the end of Day 1 by. Attending developers were instructed to create a game within 24-hours, and they had to create all of the assets within the time frame (i.e. they could not open an old game to work off of). The theme they had to follow was "Bite Off More Than You Can Chew". The video itself was narrated by Sousa, in a satirical tone.

Day 2
Day 2 mainly consisted of developers working on their games for the 2019 Game Jam, and at the end of the day the games were shown off and the winners were announced.

Schedule
All times are in PST (UTC−08:00). The schedule is retrieved from here.

Friday

 * 4:00 - 6:00 - Registration
 * 6:00 - 9:00 - Dinner & Party

Saturday

 * 8:30 - 9:30 - Registration and Breakfast
 * 9:30 - 9:35 - RDC Opening
 * 9:35 - 9:55 - CEO Keynote David Baszucki, CEO & Founder
 * 9:55 - 10:15 - Developer Keynote JParty, Head of Developer Community
 * 10:15 - 10:25 - Break
 * 10:25 - 10:45 - Product Keynote, VP of Engineering, Technology
 * 10:45 - 11:10 - Guest Speaker Keynote Crystin Cox, Playfab Evangelist, Microsoft
 * 11:10 - 11:30 - Guest Speaker Keynote Robin Hunicke, Co-Founder, Funomen
 * 11:30 - 12:30 - Lunch Break
 * 12:30 - 3:00 - Breakout Sessions
 * 3:00 - 3:20 - Break
 * 3:20 - 5:15 - Breakout Sessions
 * 5:15 - 5:35 - Break
 * 5:35 - 6:05 - Engineering Panel
 * 6:15 - 6:20 - Closing Remarks
 * 6:20 - 6:30 - Game Jam Kick off
 * 6:30 - 7:20 - Dinner / Swag Handout
 * 12:00 - 1:00 - Midnight Breakfast

Sunday

 * 2:00 - 8:00 - Game Jam Continues
 * 9:00 - 10:00 - Breakfast
 * 12:00 - 2:00 - Judges Arrive/Lunch
 * 2:00 - 3:00 - Game Jam presentations
 * 3:00 - 3:30 - Judging & Awards
 * 3:30 - 4:30 - Group Picture & Farewell

Trivia

 * gave out turtles during the event.
 * This is the first RDC event to give a trophy just to attendees of the event.

Developer Quotes
See /Developer Quotes/.


 * CEO address
 * Justin Sousa