Roblox Weekly: August 20–26, 2023
Official Plugin for Blender, autocomplete emojis and commands for text chat, and 2 new Dominus hats released?!
Welcome to Roblox Weekly, a newsletter series covering the latest and greatest news, announcements, and events that happen on the Roblox platform. Let’s recap everything that happened for the week of August 20–26, 2023…
Reference Roblox Integration for Blender
Roblox has created an open-source reference integration for Blender. Blender is one of the most used tools by the community, so Roblox wanted to create faster and better interoperability with Studio. With this add-on, you can:
- Upload 3D Models to Roblox, without leaving Blender. This includes rigged models, and soon support for animations.
- Iterate on these models in Blender, and see your updates translate to Roblox near instantaneously thanks to Package Auto Update.
- Work on large scenes made up of multiple models, and upload them all simultaneously.
You can download this add-on from GitHub. To install into Blender, follow the installation steps in the README file.
R6 to R15 Adapter
This week, Roblox introduced the R6 to R15 Adapter, a product that will allow creators who build R6 experiences to use the latest R15 avatar features while retaining a similar feel, functionality, and movement to their R6 experience. Currently available in Studio as a beta feature, the R6 to R15 Adapter works as an “emulation layer” to allow R6 scripts to run on R15 bodies. When R15 avatars enter an R6 experience, they will behave similarly to their R6 counterparts but retain features like layered clothing and animated heads.
With the announcement of this feature, some users were concerned that R6 would be completely removed from the platform. Roblox had this to say regarding the concerns:
“We will preserve the classic look, style, and movement of R6. We will deprecate the R6 technology stack at some point in the future because of its limitations.”
Emoji and Command Autocomplete for Text Chat
Text Chat on Roblox now supports Emoji and Command Autocomplete on Desktop. You can trigger emoji autocomplete by typing a colon (:), and command autocomplete by typing backslash (/). It is important to note that this functionality is only available in experiences that use the new TextChatService. Any experiences that use the legacy chat system will not support this feature. Learn more about this feature plus how developers can customize it on the Forum.
Studio Camera & Navigation Improvements
A suite of new improvements have been released for the Camera and Navigation functions in Roblox Studio. These improvements include camera speed customizability, focus interpolation, logarithmic zoom, and more.
Camera Speed Customizability
You can now modify your camera speed without navigating to Studio Settings. Simply hold the Right Mouse Button and move the scroll wheel to increase or decrease your camera speed.
Focus Interpolation
When pressing F to focus on an object, the camera will now interpolate to frame the selection rather than directly teleporting. This feature can be disabled in Studio Settings.
Logarithmic Zoom
You can now make the distance traveled by the scroll wheel adaptive based on the size of the object. This allows more granular movements with the scroll wheel when manipulating a close-up object. This feature can be disabled in Studio Settings.
Note that some of these changes may not work if you are currently using plugins that affect the camera.
How Roblox is Tackling Intellectual Property (IP) on the Avatar Marketplace
This week, Roblox put out a detailed Forum post discussing how intellectual property (IP) works on the platform. With more and more creators being able to upload content to the Avatar Marketplace, there is a risk of potential copyright infringement if these creators are not aware of the laws and regulations in place. Here are some of the kley takeaways from the post:
- When you create an original work, the things that are unique about it — your intellectual property — automatically get legal copyright protection as soon as you create it.
- The more original and creative your design is, the broader your copyright protection can be.
- Not all items you create are protectable IP. Publishing a design on Roblox that you found elsewhere does not necessarily give you IP ownership for that design.
- Only the IP rights holder knows what rights they have and who they have given permission to use their creations. Roblox can’t take down a potentially IP infringing item until the rights holder files a takedown report letting Roblox know what they believe infringes their rights.
- If you give credit to the copyright owner you don’t automatically have the rights to use their copyrighted work.
- If you find content on Roblox that you believe infringes your IP rights, see the DMCA Guidelines for additional information on how to submit an IP takedown report to Roblox.
Upcoming Changes to Fields in CatalogAPI
As part of ongoing efforts to upgrade and consolidate public APIs, Roblox will be deprecating a few endpoints in the CatalogAPI, including ones that return Genre and Purchase Count of items on the Avatar Marketplace. These are the endpoints that will be affected:
- POST v1/catalog/item/details
- GET v1/catalog/item/{itemId}/details
- GET v1/search/items/details
- GET v2/search/items/details
- GET v2/recommendations/{subject}/details
These changes are expected to roll out by the end of September 2023.
2 New Dominus Hats
The Dominus series on Roblox is one of the most pristine and sought for series of hats on the platform. The last Dominus to be uploaded was the Dominus Formidulosus back in October of 2019. This item could have been purchased for 13,000 Robux on a 1-day and 7-hour timer and became limited shortly after going off-sale, being the first Dominus to do so since 2017 (source: Roblox Wiki). However, on Friday, Roblox uploaded 2 additional Dominus hats to the Avatar Marketplace—the Dominus Desperationis and the Dominus Azurelight.
The descriptions don’t give any clues as to how to obtain these hats, so it is currently unknown how users will be able to get their hands on them. Once additional information is known, Bloxy News will provide an update.
Malicious Packages Targeting Roblox API Users
Roblox has identified more than a dozen malicious packages targeting Roblox API users on the Github npm repository. These malicious packages reproduce code from the legitimate noblox.js package but add malicious code. The malicious packages imitated the legitimate package noblox.js, a Node.js Roblox API wrapper used to write scripts that interact with the Roblox platform. This was identified on August 22, 2023 but it is believed to have begun early August. You can find the full list of packages identified as malicious along with more information here.
And that’s a wrap! Thanks for tuning in to this week’s Roblox Weekly. Come back here next week to see what Roblox will be up to next. To keep up to date with the latest and greatest Roblox news, follow Bloxy News on social media.
