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ROBLOX Forum » Game Creation and Development » Scripters
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The ROBLOX Dilemma

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Quenty is not online. Quenty
Joined: 03 Sep 2009
Total Posts: 9316
19 Jan 2012 09:59 PM
Why does everyone complain about ROBLOX? The immature community? The locked API? The ability (or lack of) of doing things? The updates that they don't like?

There are several things and reasons that you could say so. But what seems to be the real reason would be the balancing between easy of use and the ability to create whatever someone wants. In the beginning of ROBLOX, obviously only people who really knew Lua, or at least understand programming, really played ROBLOX a lot. The fact ROBLOX is a sandbox engine should tell you that much.

After a while, with new prospects, ROBLOX started expanding. New building tools, appeared, tools were created. Building techniques created. And new users came, because the now, now you didn't need to know Lua to play ROBLOX. You could play games that others made.

If you look at the first news article, you will see a few people on ROBLOX would really know about. You see C++ stuff, vector math talk, maybe just references. But they talk about optimizing ROBLOX physics. If that story was posted today, lots of users would wonder what the word 'optimize' really means. Phrases such as "For those of you that are familiar with the standard template library" or " The engine has been designed to work on n-core processing architectures, but once again we have not made this optimization" would baffle the young user.

In the first few years of the ROBLOX new, you see stuff like "Your question touches on two issues: parametric/custom parts and simulation efficiency.", and talk about physics, like convex hull collision. You also have talk about new features.

As ROBLOX increased users, as stated in a January news "....had gathered more users than one social clique could accommodate." At this point, most of the users still at least probably understood what programming or C++ was. But as ROBLOX noticed things that were happening, such as " Ever since the beginning of Roblox, players have spontaneously organized themselves into teams and armies. ", and created stuff to respond to this.

This naturally created more or easier things in the class of making games. However, with new arrivals, also arrived complications in the game engine. Parts of the API had to be locked up as ROBLOX built itself upon itself, adding more and more to their code. This created a code that, was easy to exploit due to the addition of code, forcing the locking of API, along with a TON of functions and methods.

So, now at this point, we have an unindated network system, with layers of functions and methods added onto it, years of effort with user input. We are soon to add new features to terrain. And I somewhat wonder. How long is the code at this point? And someday, even the administrators themselves admit. The code will have to be rewritten for optimization.

But you also must notice the improvements. The learning curve is now lower, atleast for creating a few games, then it shoots up. It could be compared to....

           ROBLOX LEARNING CURVE

 |                               |               
 |                              |   Vector Math (Maybe equal/below with Calculus)
 |                             /    Scripting Concepts (Calculus)
 |                            |               
 |                            /        
 |                           /                 
 |                          /                  
 |                      __/    Scripting Concepts (Algebra)     
 |  Playing   ____/         OOP Programming
 |     ______/        Learning to build        
 |__/_______________________
    (Less) How Hard (More)

This gap has seemed to become a serious concern to the ROBLOX administrators. With the outcome of...

- Stamper tool
- Terrain
- Plugins
- New building tools
- Tutorials
- Wiring (also applies to making coding simpler)

We experience an attempt to make building easier. And it has become so. However, when users, which have gone through about 2-3 different build tool versions, try to learn scripting, they have no idea about studio, scripting, the explorer, ect. There is no link the wiki. And so, when trying to learn scripting, or advance building through studio and plugins, they experience confusion. This is because the lower portion of the game, the easy part, like wiring and building has been graphically rendered and refined, the goal of ROBLOX's last year or so.

However, when you get the scripting, they receive a notepad inscribed with 'print 'Hello World''. That is, if they can find studio, figure out how to open explorer and properties, find the insert, button, then object, the script, then figure out how to double click on it, and then, if their lucky, can find the wiki and start learning.

Even the coding syntax errors, and the coloring is off. Book marking doesn't exist. The closest to autotabbing you get is highlighting multiple lines and pushing the tab button. The replace function doesn't accept wild cards. Studio will randomly crash.

The deal is, is that this kind of thing makes the learning curve extremely high. A simple sentence after 'print 'hello world', in a comments with a link to the wiki/explaining scripting could help.

ROBLOX could update a few minor things that deal with ROBLOX and scripting, and perhaps reduce the learning curve. API when being protected could be explained in a developers/update blog like you had before, or on the wiki.

Another problem is the community in general. We have too much hazing, along with the fact that the learning curve for making games is so high, that even though more potential can be found on ROBLOX then Minecraft or Blockland, there isn't enough players to create any valid games, creating a negative loop where users continue to be young, and ROBLOX is considered an immature game.

When users complain about ROBLOX, they usually mention game play being bad, the community even worse, and how moderation sucks. We should note that the community is bad because of the economic system ROBLOX is built upon, basically greed. Kids want tickets. You get tickets for creating a well visited place. They then spend all their effort making a well visited place, not a fun or cool place. The community is also bad, because of the negative feedback and learning curve.

So to make ROBLOX better, and to stop these complaints, ROBLOX could reduce the learning curve. It could perhaps reward users for quality, not quantity. It could make the community more mature, and optimize the game engine, to make the game larger, funner, and easier to create.

Right now, the easiest thing to do, would be make changes to studio. I hope, that studio, even small basic things, like a link to the wiki, would help create a new ROBLOX, not only older and more mature users play, but one where all players can at least try to script, and have a better chance of making a quality game.

tl;dr
(^ Ha, now you can only say 'inafter').

- Quenty
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Quenty is not online. Quenty
Joined: 03 Sep 2009
Total Posts: 9316
19 Jan 2012 10:01 PM
Summery: The learning curve sucks. Fix studio.

Extra: Stop hazing.
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Aaaboy97 is not online. Aaaboy97
Joined: 05 Apr 2009
Total Posts: 6612
19 Jan 2012 10:10 PM
I read it all, and I agree EXCEPT:

You said funner
And used then instead of than

*grammar police*
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aboy5643 is not online. aboy5643
Joined: 08 Oct 2010
Total Posts: 5458
19 Jan 2012 10:11 PM
My opinion. A separate website should be built for advanced users to post games on. The clutter of places built by the target audience of Roblox which are fun to younger kids, but are really sloppy in our eyes, would be gone and only cool new things would exist, like in the olden days. Perhaps Roblox would limit what games they put up (selective uploading? :/), target older audiences for the more popular and higher rated games to ACTUALLY be **good** games for this audience (I don't want to see obbies, tycoons, non-scripted places)

Just a thought. This older audience gets somewhat limited with publicity due to the fact there isn't a large base of teens on this website that will PLAY our games. The new site would need to have a feel similar to Kongregate, ArmorGames, etc. (PROFESSIONAL quality games, or at least something with time and thought put into it)

Opinions.
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ProArchitect is not online. ProArchitect
Joined: 19 Jan 2010
Total Posts: 26
19 Jan 2012 10:13 PM
Interesting. It all starts with community, my boy. The learning curve is too high. I think a link to the wiki is a great idea. Quite honestly, re-optimization sounds like an excellent suggestion. I think it would be well worth the time, effort, and money. Provided [insert person in charge of ROBLOX's money here] stops being a miser D:
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Quenty is not online. Quenty
Joined: 03 Sep 2009
Total Posts: 9316
19 Jan 2012 10:13 PM
They don't need a new website, just seperated/prohibited content, which shouldn't even be mentioned to the younger users. If knowledge is power, but they don't know it, they can't exploit.

The website basically needs to have a few themes, and to have better game quality. I.E. the learning curve is to hard for fun games.
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JulienDethurens is not online. JulienDethurens
Joined: 11 Jun 2009
Total Posts: 11046
19 Jan 2012 10:18 PM
Well, if you press F1 ingame, it opens the browser on the wiki's page...

It even annoys me because I keep pressing F1 by accident.. >.>

Anyways, I believe the script editor must be improved.

The syntax highlighting should be as good as Gedit's or SciTE's. The script editor should have auto tabbing (easy, just keep the same ammount of tabs/spaces as on the precedent line. How is that hard?). And many other features.

Seriously, the script editor needs major improvements.

Also, I believe the whole ROBLOX API should be documented in the object browser. There should be a description for every method, property, event, object. Not only some, EVERY OF THEM SHOULD HAVE A DESCRIPTION.

Also, the problem of exploiters should be fixed. Just like they did an hack week, they should do an exploiting week or something like that where they spend their time finding exploits and patching them.

Exploiters are a part of what stops ROBLOX from advancing, improving. Just because of exploiters, ROBLOX has to spam the ROBLOX API with locked methods and stuff and has to remove features.

Also, precisely to fight against exploiting, they should also move everything that's locked to the C side. Since it's only supposed to be used by the admins, there's no point in making it accessible from Lua and it should therefore only be accessible from C side. Everything that needs to use locked stuff should be on C side too.

Also, the studio and the application that is used to play games should both be separated. There is no point in keeping stuff that's only for the studio in the game player and stuff that's only for online games in the studio. Also, 85% of exploits come precisely from the fact they are linked together, which is one more reason to separate them.
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MrgamesNwatch is not online. MrgamesNwatch
Joined: 02 Feb 2009
Total Posts: 7729
19 Jan 2012 10:19 PM
I'd have to agree with aaaboy, as soon as i saw "funner" i was like "thats silly :P". anyways, i read it all and i'd have to say that pretty much is the problem. the lack of knowledge and guidance among users. Though considering the average age of a player, its kinda hard to fix this. the younger players don't really care to much for quality and there the ones which control the games popularity.

~I've been to nil and back.
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Quenty is not online. Quenty
Joined: 03 Sep 2009
Total Posts: 9316
19 Jan 2012 10:24 PM
The problem with exploiters is the addition of extra code creates even more problems/local running code.

Also, must people don't push F1. Hardly anyone does, actually. Most people don't know it opens help. Obviously, if lots of user never click on the 'Forum' link, their not going to push F1. It also breaks when your browser isn't open. (Chrome) (Another studio problem)

That's why we need a link, on the blue top bar, that says wiki.

Also, hacks come from local running scripts/communication interception, which is local. Just convert all the code into machine code before sending it over.

But the real problem is the lack or people creating fun games. I will continue to blame the learning curve. Low quality games are a lot more often/appearing then hackers.
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Quenty is not online. Quenty
Joined: 03 Sep 2009
Total Posts: 9316
19 Jan 2012 10:25 PM
@MrNames

If they can make it better, they will. Reduce the learning curve, and they can make it better.

@Grammar Police

Get over it, hypocrites.
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ProArchitect is not online. ProArchitect
Joined: 19 Jan 2010
Total Posts: 26
19 Jan 2012 10:26 PM
"Just convert all the code into machine code before sending it over."
That sounds like compilation, not dynamic type.
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JulienDethurens is not online. JulienDethurens
Joined: 11 Jun 2009
Total Posts: 11046
19 Jan 2012 10:27 PM
@Quenty

I keep pressing F1 by accident...

Also, hum, Lua can't be converted to machine code, only to bytecode...
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Quenty is not online. Quenty
Joined: 03 Sep 2009
Total Posts: 9316
19 Jan 2012 10:29 PM
Fine. You get the point. They now have to recompile code before editing it.

@Julien

Most don't make silly mistakes like that.
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JulienDethurens is not online. JulienDethurens
Joined: 11 Jun 2009
Total Posts: 11046
19 Jan 2012 10:33 PM
Well, I agree that they shouldn't keey the Lua version of code once they compiled it. They should keep the Lua code until the script runs, and then, while compiling it, get rid of the Lua code.

But, anyways, that's not exactly the point. The fact that scripts are being stolen doesn't really matter. It's not what ruins the community.

In fact, there are already changes planned on the community side. You know, all that age up thingy? Maybe that'll give interesting results on the community, even though these are changes on the site only. Perhaps these site changes will have a good repercussion on the game itself.
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NINJAKID09 is not online. NINJAKID09
Joined: 27 Aug 2009
Total Posts: 14392
19 Jan 2012 10:35 PM
You have quite a valid point there, the learning curve is indeed steep.
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JulienDethurens is not online. JulienDethurens
Joined: 11 Jun 2009
Total Posts: 11046
19 Jan 2012 10:37 PM
Learning a programming language is hard and ROBLOX Lua is no exception.
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Quenty is not online. Quenty
Joined: 03 Sep 2009
Total Posts: 9316
19 Jan 2012 10:42 PM
I want my friends to be able to play ROBLOX, and open up studio, and start programming stuff with me. Lots of my friends are taking Java this year, and possibly could understand Lua. However, the learning curve is almost like Java.

Really, I've learned more Java in 2 days then I did Lua, in 1 year.

http://community.roblox.com/archives/13

read that. It explains what ROBLOX should be doing now, at the end. Widespread optimization, now the big picture has been nailed. BTW, it's #13. What does that tell you?
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MrgamesNwatch is not online. MrgamesNwatch
Joined: 02 Feb 2009
Total Posts: 7729
19 Jan 2012 11:25 PM
daaang! your right. I've just realized how long its taken me to know what i know in Rbx.Lua, i think i started scripting a little less than 2 years ago, but the process accelerates the more you know. (causally learning of course)

~I've been to nil and back.
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Quenty is not online. Quenty
Joined: 03 Sep 2009
Total Posts: 9316
19 Jan 2012 11:37 PM
Casual learning Java for 2 days. :D
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Scriptishish is not online. Scriptishish
Joined: 16 Oct 2007
Total Posts: 1231
20 Jan 2012 01:20 AM
Hmm, scripting is really going to need to be explored when they're making their universes as well. Unless they made wiring handle it pretty well, but good luck.
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yoyoman2 is not online. yoyoman2
Joined: 07 Mar 2009
Total Posts: 2170
20 Jan 2012 05:36 AM
You my friend, should run roblox.
good job.


I completely agree, also, I think that if roblox lets a few parts of the API unlocked then we would finally have more stuff to work with.
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Brandonhare is not online. Brandonhare
Joined: 02 May 2007
Total Posts: 11005
20 Jan 2012 05:39 AM
Sometimes when I get mad at how "restricted" roblox is, I try to come up with a list of things I can't accomplish because of the restrictions. I can never think of anything that is completely impossible.

Working around barriers is half the fun anyway.
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Radioaktiivinen is not online. Radioaktiivinen
Joined: 25 Apr 2009
Total Posts: 18629
20 Jan 2012 06:33 AM
I blame the alphacratic 42-floor turtle farm country.
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nate890 is not online. nate890
Joined: 22 Nov 2008
Total Posts: 21686
20 Jan 2012 06:35 AM
"I keep pressing F1 by accident..."

I always seem to be pressing F2, and that disables my internet.

­<'+1 Post. Ujelly?'>
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TheMyrco is not online. TheMyrco
Joined: 13 Aug 2011
Total Posts: 15105
20 Jan 2012 09:50 AM
I love reading word walls :D.
Did you know that reading actualy trains the brain?

But back to this.
I agreed what with you said, try to accomplish and what you think about ROBLOX.

Can you also tell me about this learning curve? I meann I don't get it with what you mean by a bigger and lower learning curve.
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