The ROBLOX team unveiled an array of improvements and tools coming soon to our platform at ROBLOX Developers Conference West (RDC West) last weekend. The event was the first of its kind, attracting about 75 of the top game creators from our community and more than 40,000 Twitch viewers. Today, we’re going to recap the most anticipated announcements, as presented by Simon “gemlocker” Kozlov and Adam “rbadam” Miller. Consider this an easily digestible version of the giant box of awesome that was opened at the event!

ROBLOX Studio announcements

ROBLOX Studio is the application in which serious ROBLOX game creation happens. It’s already a rich and complex development environment, facilitating world building, gameplay scripting, interface design, and, of course, publishing. But there’s plenty more to come. Click the links below to see the video demos from RDC West!

1. New “dragger” tool

The dragger is one of the fundamental building tools in ROBLOX Studio. Currently, it lets you select a part (or multiple parts), and drag it around your 3D work space to re-position it using the mouse. The new dragger makes it easier to achieve perfect alignment and positioning of parts, incorporates additional part manipulation tools (scale and rotate), and allows you to customize the reference plane for each part, among other things. Check out a live prototype of the feature!

2. Group Games and revenue sharing

Group games is an upcoming feature that allows a group to own and publish a game. What’s exciting about this is that not only can all members of the group with the right permissions edit the game, making it easier to collaborate on projects, but the group owner can split the game’s earnings among all its contributors. For example, the group owner could set up recurring payments that give 50% to contributor A, 25% to contributor B, and the remaining 25% to group funds. You can watch a more detailed description of group games in our archived RDC West livestream.

In conjunction with group games, we also showed our own version of source control, which centralizes the inner workings of a group game and makes sure changes update for all project contributors.

3. Multi-builder Studio

One of the most requested Studio features of all time is the ability to have more than one person working on a game simultaneously and in real time. We demonstrated multi-builder Studio for the first time at RDC West and the response, in person and on Twitch, was unanimous: make this happen. Check out a live demo of multi-builder Studio.

ROBLOX Client announcements

The ROBLOX client is the engine that powers all the games you play. It’s the physics, the graphics, the multiplayer networking, and all the other fun things that make online games work. The features we’re working on will not only improve game creation, but also make gameplay better for the entire ROBLOX community. Click the links below to see the video demos from RDC West!

1. Smooth terrain

At this point, smooth terrain isn’t exactly a surprise — in fact, it’s actually been available for experimentation in one of our test environments for weeks. How you’ll create smooth terrain, however, is a new revelation, and we showed off more of what’s possible last weekend.

2. New physics engine

We’ve been working on a new physics engine that we believe will drastically improve vehicles and collisions in ROBLOX games. Not only will this facilitate new and better games for developers, but will also make gameplay better for everyone on ROBLOX. You can see the difference between the old and new physics in the videos we showed at RDC West.

3. Particle effect editor

ROBLOX currently supports three key particle effects: smoke, fire, and sparkles. (There is also the forcefield and explosion, but those are less commonly used in the creation of games and environments.) While you can customize those effects to achieve the desired look, we’re working on a system that’ll let you take that customization further than ever — and build totally unique creations using particles.

As you can see, there’s a lot of cool stuff coming to ROBLOX in 2015. We’ll have more information on each of these features when they’re closer to release.

In the meantime, which of these updates has you the most hyped?