Ah! Shame, shame. I was taking a midday nap as a result of a terrible sleeping schedule and ended up missing the recap by 2 hours. I don’t know if my retrospective will be that visible due to proceeding replies as well, but matter not! It is time to get the run down going, as is a monthly tradition for me.

In the September Recap, we were promised that October was a month to be looking forward to and joy did October live up to that promise. There have been a lot of great strides this month and I’m absolutely excited about the future to come.

DevForum - New Post Approvers & A Personal Brief

As mentioned by @ColdCrazyGoku above, there are now three new members of the Post Approval team, myself being one of them. Cheers! I’d like to talk a bit about that and about myself in general. Some stuff I want to get out there, since I’m typically known to be a reserved person.

To be honest, I have never seen myself ever going anywhere on the platform, even on the DevForum. I use those huge spare pockets of time to post some on the DevForum and I really do enjoy helping people out. It makes me feel that I can make others’ games progress wherein there is a lack of any content being produced from me (which I want to change soon!).

There are a lot of things I had never expected since my invitation in 2017 to the DevForum, with respect to the lack of productivity since my joining of the platform in 2010. Being able to join the QA Testers program as an NDA Verified tester, being selected as one of the new Top Contributors during the program reform and now joining Community Post Approval . I’d like to take pride in those achievements since I hold them very near and dear to me.

One thing I don’t particularly like is complacency. When I was selected as a Top Contributor for the start of the new cycle, I said that I was fine where I was and didn’t really have any plans to go higher. This was also the case when I thought that PA would be a real hassle after, well, hearing a few stories. Truth is, now that I’m here, I realise that I was never satisfied with just Top Contributor and I did want to move higher. That hasn’t stopped. I have my sights set on becoming a Community Sage, haha.

On the note of wanting to reach higher heights, I have also decided that sometime soon it will be time to start taking development seriously and be productive. I’ve been sitting around for a little too long without much productivity or progress in my passion. So, my aim is to release some projects and update old ones between now and December, then go from there. I currently only develop for roleplay groups, but I’m also thinking now about releasing my own game projects.

2019 has been a big year of realisation and change for me; change about my level of involvement on the platform and change about myself outside of Roblox. This journey has been a wild ride but I am committed to making it better for myself and hopefully for others. Thank you to those who’ve supported me, helped me learn new things over the years and given me the chance to come back from admittedly cursed moderations almost nothing. I am truly grateful.

LiveOps

Once again, congratulations to all of those who have been featured in the LiveOps programs.

I think that my perspective of LiveOps has changed over time. I’m still quite upset about the removal of Roblox Events, me being a big person of tradition and nostalgia, but I figured that they would start being phased out once events starting being hosted on user games over being developed by Roblox.

I think that LiveOps, completely contrary to my initial stance, is a good utility because it gives your game a space to get advertised for virtually no cost. It’s effectiveness of course relies on how often the page is up or how the game gets across to other users, but I can see it’s strong worth for start-ups with little funding to roll with to start up semi-organic growth.

Hoping to appear on this page one day.

Updates and Changes

Roblox absolutely killed it with updates this month. I’m still looking forward to items being picked off of the High-Level Platform Roadmap since I’m excited for almost every single item, but the updates we’ve gotten between are just as amazing.

Out of the list of updates currently present on the thread, I have a single favourite update: Sound script changes. Anyone remember the absolute frustration that would come out of working with the Sound script and seeing the console spam? Anyone just generally didn’t like how the Sound script worked? Nope, nope, out the window. Goodbye to those problems! They will not be missed!

The new Sound script not only gives sound control to clients which prevents exploitability in nearly every regard (changes only take effect on the client), but there is zero network traffic or server involvement with this new code. Pure client-sided greatness. It also, for those of you who are fork- or browse-savvy, encourages a certain style of coding where you in fact can push the work to the client instead of making the server bear the brunt of everything. The source is worth a scroll-through.

Release Notes

In addition to Updates and Changes, the Release Notes happened to reveal a lot of awesome updates without dedicated announcements. For those of you interested in the advancement of the platform, keeping up to date with every single Release Notes is worth it to prepare for or incorporate new features. Here are some of my highlights from each (if there are none, no section for it).

Release Notes 400

UDim2.fromOffset and UDim2.fromScale: For the lazy, a gift descends. Judging by its addition as a constructor (but is not yet documented), I believe these are intended to be like UDim2.new but only using two values. The other ones are automatically filled in for you.

Release Notes 407

table.create / table.find: Hooray for more array-based functionality! After learning a certain technique and implementation detail about tables from a friend, I started creating tables with placeholder elements to help with size allocation as well as reducing expense. Probably overkill but…

Release Notes 408

Attributes: Although it only allows pure-data, thank you for allowing us to natively expand upon Roblox instances without the need to wrap or create custom implementations. I understand those will still be necessary for non-primitives excluding functions and userdata, but that’s fine.

And that’s it.

We were definitely told that October would be exciting and oh my did it live up. I’d like to offer a big thanks to the Roblox team for providing us with all these wonderful tools and to Developer Relations for, as always, updating us on the latest.