Roblox Weekly: June 18–24, 2023
Mature experiences for people ages 17 and older, VR enhancements, and the new Roblox Partner Program!
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 June 18–24, 2023…
17+ Experiences
As Roblox works to create a platform for everyone of all ages, the creation of content for older, more mature audiences is inevitable. Right now, creators can take a short questionnaire that determines what Age Recommendation their experience falls under. This week, Roblox announced that creators can now make experiences intended for users ages 17 and older. In the coming weeks, eligible users will begin to see this new content. 17+ content may contain intense violence, heavy realistic blood, moderate crude humor, romantic themes, unplayable gambling content and/or the presence of alcohol.
VR Updates: OpenXR, Height Scaling and Floor Tracking
The latest Roblox for VR release includes updates to height scaling and floor tracking. A player’s view of the virtual world will automatically scale so that your avatar feels human-sized and roughly represents your real world size. In addition, with this release Roblox will also be moving to OpenXR, providing a solution for developers to easily support every current and future VR headset that Roblox officially supports.
New Layered Clothing Fitting Algorithm
A new fitting algorithm for layered clothing is now available in beta. This new algorithm was designed with the goal of reducing the bulkiness of multi-layered clothing and producing more visually-pleasing and realistic-looking dressed Roblox avatars.
To enable this beta, go to File > Beta Features and select Multilayer Wrap Fix. Please restart Studio to enable these changes.
IsVerified API
With the launch of the IsVerified API, Roblox Creators now have the ability to gate parts of their experiences to identity-verified players. This can reduce the incentives for alternative accounts (which are often unverified) from joining experiences. IsVerified API will encourage user authenticity and prevent repeat offenders in your experiences. Users who have verified a non-VOIP (Voice Over IP) phone number or government ID through the Account Verification process will be classified as identity-verified. Tying these identity verification signals to user accounts can deter behaviors like cheating, scamming, or harassment.
Introducing the Roblox Partner Program
During Cannes Lions, Roblox announced a new Roblox Partner Program designed to scale brand innovation and enable a self-serve, global advertising ecosystem on the platform. The Program’s community-forward approach is focused on engaging a broad network of platform advocates — from Roblox developer studios to early adopters among agencies, brands, and third-party sellers — in global education and best practice sharing for brands. The program also offers all of its partners the same meaningful incentives and transparent Immersive Ads pricing.
Removal of 6s Cool Down for Data Stores
The 6-second limit interval to write to the same Data Store key has been removed! This applies to both standard and ordered Data Stores. Previously, writes to the same key of a data store within 6s in the same server would be added to a queue or rejected if the queue is full. The mechanism was set to protect the backend system but also led to challenges for your scripts to work around it. Read more on the Developer Forum.
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.
