11 ms·

Roblox on Linux with recent Wine 6.11

185 points by homarp 5y ago

undfg 5y ago
As you can see in this article, and as it is said in hn all the time, running games on Linux is really easy.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Usually it’s not for multiplayer games. I’m surprised Roblox’s anti-cheat is fine running on Wine since Roblox has been dealing with cheaters (injecting LUA scripts into the client/server, known as level 4/7 exploits) for over a decade.
  - undfg 5y ago
    Absolutely none of the problems mentioned in this article have anything to do with Roblox being an online game.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      Let’s just say this would have been (and is) a problem for competitive games like Fortnite, Valorant and Apex Legends - at least until Epic releases the Linux Easy Anti Cheat to third party developers https://www.easy.ac/en-us/support/game/guides/os/ https://www.easy.ac/en-us/support/game/guides/os/
      - ThatPlayer 5y ago
        Linux Easy Anti Cheat already exists. Games like Rust and 7 Days to Die do this fine on Linux. The issue is those developers aren't releasing a Linux native version of the game that can use the native anti-cheat. And getting a Windows version of anti-cheat working through Wine is harder. Games like Valorant and Apex will never release a Linux native version
  - donkarma 5y ago
    They mostly solved cheating with good netcode design ala Source Engine
- villasv 5y ago
  So easy that it is newsworthy.
- beebeepka 5y ago
  Yeah, it's fine for the most part. Of course there are some problems with junk such as recent EA games requiring their completely broken launcher. I just asked for a refund after trying to play Crysis 3. Games with crazy rootkit anti cheat spyware also don't work. Such as PUBG. Not a big loss, really. StarCraft works, Doom works, Quake, works. Even Cyberpunk works fine with AMD and Nvidia cards. I am not going back to Windows. Gaming hasn't been an issue for a while. Huge thanks to everyone Took us almost 20 years. Could've been sooner if Linus cared about gaming.
  - x4e 5y ago
    > Could've been sooner if Linus cared about gaming. This surprises me, so you have any more details about Linus’ impact? I’ve always thought the main barriers were NVIDIA and, lately, Battleye.
    - beebeepka 5y ago
      I don't think he ever blocked anything of substance that could have helped. What I meant is that he just don't care and never did. As far as I know, of course
    - undfg 5y ago
      There should be a stable kernel interface for drivers. The developers of Linux have always been against the idea.
- worldmerge 5y ago
  It's kinda funny that people can't read the sarcasm in this. (I hope it's sarcasm).
  - indigodaddy 5y ago
    I believe they did read the sarcasm, and that’s why they downvoted probably..
nsajko 5y ago
I know what's Linux and what's Wine, and Roblox is some video game; but what's the interesting part in this page?
- boba7 5y ago
  This particular video game is crucial for gnu/linux to become popular and finally crush Microsoft.
  - gizmo385 5y ago
    I don't think Linux is anywhere close to crushing Windows as the de facto desktop gaming platform.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Zhyl 5y ago
      Closer than you might think. With Valves efforts now 88% [0] of the top hundred Steam games run on Linux and there is ongoing work to improve drivers, support and UX. Steam now allows you to install any Windows game on linux in the same way you'd install any other game. That's a big improvement. Anti-cheat is an issue, but otherwise it isn't a million miles away. [0] https://www.protondb.com/ https://www.protondb.com/
      - caslon 5y ago
        I think the above poster was more talking in terms of market share. I only use free software, so I don't really have an incentive to shill against Linux here, but it's worth noting that among the premiere desktop gaming platform, more people use PC VR than Linux. Linux isn't winning here, despite its better...everything, because Windows has two major advantages: It's already installed, and games are marketed to kids who more often than not probably don't have a choice in operating system! Markets don't optimize for efficiency in computing.
morsch 5y ago
You can run external games using Steam's Proton[1]. It's not mentioned in the article so I guess it's not any help? [1] https://boilingsteam.com/valve-breaks-the-shackles-of-proton/ https://boilingsteam.com/valve-breaks-the-shackles-of-proton... or you could in 2019, anyway
- aspaceman 5y ago
  Proton is implemented via Wine - it's like a collection of software and automatic configuration. You use Wine to implement Windows syscalls. Wine also has DXVK to convert the DirectX calls to Vulkan ones. So it's all the same stuff really. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/ https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/ wine @ eef39a6 vkd3d-proton @ 72d9b32 Cobbling together existing tools is really powerful in games and graphics :)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - spicybright 5y ago
    So powerful. I feel when many try doing this a lot reach for custom code instead of leaning established technology. Building on wine just for games is an excellent thing too. I just bought crossover for mac the other day (commercial wine tuned for games) and have been pleasantly surprised how well games run under it, esp. compares to my dual booted windows for some reason. 19 inch 2029 macbook pro
- Johnyma22 5y ago
  and surprisingly this approach works incredibly well from my personal experience.
  - tvb12 5y ago
    I've been manually setting up wine prefixes for my games, and until last week I had not run into any issues. For some reason, Ori and the Blind Forest DE could not see input from my controller. When running the game through steam, everything works. It's an excellent last resort, even if you're more comfortable using Wine directly.
Black101 5y ago
I think that was the only program that prevented me from installing Linux on the kid PC
qwerty456127 5y ago
I was unpleasantly surprised there still is no Linux-native version.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Consider that their primary audience is close to 40 million mostly kid players. Young kids generally don't care about OS options and use whatever PC their parents buy, which will mostly be Windows. Further, even Windows PC players are in the minority, with close to 75% of users playing on mobile devices. Linux would always be a minority option. In the case of Roblox, it would be the minority option of a minority platform. Not really the type of thing the company is going to throw money at while they're supporting 4 other platofrms: Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android. All of them more accessible to their audience. Disappointment in their choice not to develop for Linux is natural, but it's a fairly reasonable choice on their part to avoid increasing their platform & build maintenance requirements by 25% for an exceptionally small number of users that would refuse to use a different OS.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    I expected it to be available on RaspberryPI.
    - dolmen 5y ago
      Windows is available on Raspberry PI.
- michaelbrave 5y ago
  More than half of their player base (like 60%) play on mobile, so I image it's just not a big priority to them.
- washadjeffmad 5y ago
  "Linux-native" is an outdated mindset. With tools like WINE and Proton+DXVK/D3DVK / SteamPlay, software developed on Windows is in all practicality platform agnostic. After more than a decade, we know the cost of supporting Linux native builds seems to be the sanity and good will of the devs. For indie and small teams, it's literally taking food out of their mouths asking them to use resources fixing obscure bugs from a vocal minority that they could instead put towards developing new content or planning their next projects. I get the sentiment, but really, we won the lock-in war. It's kinder to ask devs to stick to what they know and are comfortable with, and if they want to build with SteamPlay in mind, then we all win.
2Gkashmiri 5y ago
i recently tried to install amoung us exe on phoenecis play on linux. there is this starting bug that is caused by shaders. i tried a few fixes but none worked. It looks like i need to wait for 6.11
abledon 5y ago
So for the most part, has roblox replaced most 'physical' building activities kids used to do in the 80s/90s/00s ? E.g. Lego/ going outside, building forts etc?
- McGlockenshire 5y ago
  Roblox is both a creation/building tool and a minigame building/playing tool. Both of my kids love playing minigames with their friends, but don't build anything. Minecraft scratches their building itch for the most part.
- MattRix 5y ago
  That’s mostly Minecraft, not Roblox. Lego is still super popular… and yes kids still do go outside and build forts. Also if you’ve never played Minecraft, it is amazing, especially as a social experience, and it is very much not just for kids.
- whydoineedthis 5y ago
  No, it has probably replaced most 'gaming' activities kids used to do in the 80s/90s/00s - like Atari, GameBoy, Nintendo, Sega Genesis, etc.
encryptluks2 5y ago
Cool I guess, but a bit disappointing that it isn't just natively supported by Linux. I thought the team at Roblox would at least have enough people that were interested in helping kids create that they would see the value in creating a native Linux client.
Animats 5y ago
"Wine 6.11 or a more recent version. As of June 19, 2021, this requires using a development release." That's an annoying problem with Wine. I submitted a bug report on the released version, and it was rejected because it wasn't on the latest development version. It's hard to install Wine in a local directory, so installing a version that didn't come with the Linux distro is iffy. (Someone is going to tell me it's really easy, just type all these command line commands. That's not what the instructions [1] say.) [1] https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_Installation_and_Configuration https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_Installation_and_Configuration
- simion314 5y ago
  Try Play On Linux, or similar tools. It has the ability to download wine versions, it has 6.11 and 6.11 staging but not the GE or other special patched ones.
- jchw 5y ago
  To be completely fair, it really isn't that bad, at least not compared to other software. In my experience the only notably annoying part is getting all of the dependencies that you want. After that, it's basically an affair of ./configure && make. If you are using Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora, you can probably use WineHQ's repo with the winehq-devel package. You can also find the dev dependencies listed on the Fedora page. On Arch, AUR has the wine-git package that should work. On NixOS or other distros/OSes where you have the Nix package manager installed, you can get an environment with all of the dependencies setup for you, although in that case, I will at least note that you don't get a multiarch build. The situation could be better, but given the heroic amount of ridiculous stuff going on in Wine, it's not too bad either. (Not sure how many pure C programs I've seen exposing MSVC C++ ABI interfaces, but Wine is one.)
  - jbboehr 5y ago
    On debian derivatives, you can use `apt-get build-dep` to install all the compile-time dependencies of a package.
  - swiley 5y ago
ddtaylor 5y ago
Someone needs to update https://lutris.net/games/roblox/ https://lutris.net/games/roblox/
lukego 5y ago
Hey what's a good way to engage with Roblox? My 6-7yo kids love it but I don't see them doing anything creative as they do with e.g. Minecraft. maybe they are just playing it wrong?
- beermonster 5y ago
  Maybe get them to play more creative games like Build a Boat. The platform is great but like any platform there are games which either do or don’t engage creativity. Another thing you could try is get an account and play along with them. A lot of games allow for private servers / areas where you can play. Get them to add real friends from their school and hookup on a web conferencing app. That really helps with team building and communication.
- ohyeshedid 5y ago
  If they're enjoying it, and do so regularly, are they really playing it wrong?
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    What’s the typical age at which we expect people to decide if they’re doing something for fun - or if they’re doing something to create? Does it matter if it’s inside the sandbox (e.g. SimCity) or outside the sandbox (e.g. Dreamweaver)? What if the sandbox is also a tool for exploitation of the user (i.e. microtransactions?) To share my own example - beyond SimCity and not-really-understanding-how-to-make-Age-of-Empires-maps when I was 10 years old - I don’t think I can say I was really using computers constructively until I was 12/13 when I was at the point where I actually understood what I was doing with my cracked copies of Macromedia and Adobe software - so if I’m using myself as a benchmark I wouldn’t stress too much about grade-school kids being newbs… …just please don’t repress them. And introduce them to the concept of creating their own things outside of closed platforms.
    - temp22334455 5y ago
      How do you distinguish between creating and honing a skill? Some of the best engineers I know were top-level video game players in their youth. Video games taught them how to get really good at something.
miked85 5y ago
I must be getting old. I am not sure I understand what Roblox even is.
shmerl 5y ago
Roblox developers weren't helpful at all.
duxup 5y ago
My son plays Roblox a great deal. It's fascinating the variety of games on there. He'll play a tank game that is pretty much a semi-clone of World of Tanks Blitz, but then the next day he's playing a sort of bug RPG / simulator. The variety is something that I don't see in the traditional game industry where a bug rpg / simulator probably wouldn't be a thing (anymore... sim ant..) but it somehow is in the Robox ecosystem.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  There are a few of these sandbox style games around. Garys Mod, Tabletop sim, VR Chat, and Pavlov VR are all games that are platforms for mods to transform in to brand new games.
  - Jarwain 5y ago
    Even minecraft has these kinds of data packs now to support a variety of game modes. What's interesting is that roblox puts it front-and-center, it feels like the primary usecase, and I'd bet that nodding it feels more approachable compared to others
    - SilverRed 5y ago
      All of the games I listed are similar, Pavlov VR is my favorite and it comes with basically no game by default and everything is custom game modes implemented as maps from the steam workshop. I have no idea which one is easier from a creators perspective but from a player point, I absolutely love checking out the new maps and seeing a totally different way to play a FPS.
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  When you say its a great deal I'm not sure what you mean. Its free to play, then attempts to suck money out of your kids for virtual currency. We have a hard rule in the house of no money spent on virtual items. My kids still love Roblox so there must be lots of fun to be had without spending money.
opan 5y ago
If anyone wants something like Roblox that is free (as in freedom) software and runs natively on GNU/Linux, check out Minetest. Similar blocky aesthetic, mods made in Lua just like Roblox, mod content only has to be on a server, so you can join without prior setup (unlike modded Minecraft, more like Garry's Mod and Roblox), and the game is also available on Android. Not just a similar game you play with other mobile players (the way Minecraft Pocket Edition was), rather the same real game with the ability to pick up where you left off on a computer and join the same server with the same mods using your credentials for that server. I'm sure there are fewer players and less content, but it seems like a more sane base to build on for your creative ventures. They're not after your money the way Roblox often is either.
MattReigns 5y ago
Contact Cyberexpositors at gmail dot com for any tech related job… He’s the best out there. I contacted him when I had the idea that my WIFE was cheating on me, I had contacted other tech related experts on this but couldn’t get to nail her until Cyberexpositors at gmail dot com came through for me. I was able to see everything she does with her phone, who she was texting, exchanging pics with, bank statements and other info needed. He’s the Best out there. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need any help.

185 points by homarp 5y ago

undfg 5y ago

As you can see in this article, and as it is said in hn all the time, running games on Linux is really easy.

judge2020 5y ago
Usually it’s not for multiplayer games. I’m surprised Roblox’s anti-cheat is fine running on Wine since Roblox has been dealing with cheaters (injecting LUA scripts into the client/server, known as level 4/7 exploits) for over a decade.
- undfg 5y ago
  Absolutely none of the problems mentioned in this article have anything to do with Roblox being an online game.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Let’s just say this would have been (and is) a problem for competitive games like Fortnite, Valorant and Apex Legends - at least until Epic releases the Linux Easy Anti Cheat to third party developers https://www.easy.ac/en-us/support/game/guides/os/ https://www.easy.ac/en-us/support/game/guides/os/
    - ThatPlayer 5y ago
      Linux Easy Anti Cheat already exists. Games like Rust and 7 Days to Die do this fine on Linux. The issue is those developers aren't releasing a Linux native version of the game that can use the native anti-cheat. And getting a Windows version of anti-cheat working through Wine is harder. Games like Valorant and Apex will never release a Linux native version
- donkarma 5y ago
  They mostly solved cheating with good netcode design ala Source Engine
villasv 5y ago
So easy that it is newsworthy.
beebeepka 5y ago
Yeah, it's fine for the most part. Of course there are some problems with junk such as recent EA games requiring their completely broken launcher. I just asked for a refund after trying to play Crysis 3. Games with crazy rootkit anti cheat spyware also don't work. Such as PUBG. Not a big loss, really. StarCraft works, Doom works, Quake, works. Even Cyberpunk works fine with AMD and Nvidia cards. I am not going back to Windows. Gaming hasn't been an issue for a while. Huge thanks to everyone Took us almost 20 years. Could've been sooner if Linus cared about gaming.
- x4e 5y ago
  > Could've been sooner if Linus cared about gaming. This surprises me, so you have any more details about Linus’ impact? I’ve always thought the main barriers were NVIDIA and, lately, Battleye.
  - beebeepka 5y ago
    I don't think he ever blocked anything of substance that could have helped. What I meant is that he just don't care and never did. As far as I know, of course
  - undfg 5y ago
    There should be a stable kernel interface for drivers. The developers of Linux have always been against the idea.
worldmerge 5y ago
It's kinda funny that people can't read the sarcasm in this. (I hope it's sarcasm).
- indigodaddy 5y ago
  I believe they did read the sarcasm, and that’s why they downvoted probably..

nsajko 5y ago

I know what's Linux and what's Wine, and Roblox is some video game; but what's the interesting part in this page?

boba7 5y ago
This particular video game is crucial for gnu/linux to become popular and finally crush Microsoft.
- gizmo385 5y ago
  I don't think Linux is anywhere close to crushing Windows as the de facto desktop gaming platform.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Zhyl 5y ago
    Closer than you might think. With Valves efforts now 88% [0] of the top hundred Steam games run on Linux and there is ongoing work to improve drivers, support and UX. Steam now allows you to install any Windows game on linux in the same way you'd install any other game. That's a big improvement. Anti-cheat is an issue, but otherwise it isn't a million miles away. [0] https://www.protondb.com/ https://www.protondb.com/
    - caslon 5y ago
      I think the above poster was more talking in terms of market share. I only use free software, so I don't really have an incentive to shill against Linux here, but it's worth noting that among the premiere desktop gaming platform, more people use PC VR than Linux. Linux isn't winning here, despite its better...everything, because Windows has two major advantages: It's already installed, and games are marketed to kids who more often than not probably don't have a choice in operating system! Markets don't optimize for efficiency in computing.

morsch 5y ago

You can run external games using Steam's Proton[1]. It's not mentioned in the article so I guess it's not any help? [1] https://boilingsteam.com/valve-breaks-the-shackles-of-proton/ https://boilingsteam.com/valve-breaks-the-shackles-of-proton... or you could in 2019, anyway

aspaceman 5y ago
Proton is implemented via Wine - it's like a collection of software and automatic configuration. You use Wine to implement Windows syscalls. Wine also has DXVK to convert the DirectX calls to Vulkan ones. So it's all the same stuff really. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/ https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/ wine @ eef39a6 vkd3d-proton @ 72d9b32 Cobbling together existing tools is really powerful in games and graphics :)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- spicybright 5y ago
  So powerful. I feel when many try doing this a lot reach for custom code instead of leaning established technology. Building on wine just for games is an excellent thing too. I just bought crossover for mac the other day (commercial wine tuned for games) and have been pleasantly surprised how well games run under it, esp. compares to my dual booted windows for some reason. 19 inch 2029 macbook pro
Johnyma22 5y ago
and surprisingly this approach works incredibly well from my personal experience.
- tvb12 5y ago
  I've been manually setting up wine prefixes for my games, and until last week I had not run into any issues. For some reason, Ori and the Blind Forest DE could not see input from my controller. When running the game through steam, everything works. It's an excellent last resort, even if you're more comfortable using Wine directly.

Black101 5y ago

I think that was the only program that prevented me from installing Linux on the kid PC

qwerty456127 5y ago

I was unpleasantly surprised there still is no Linux-native version.

ineedasername 5y ago
Consider that their primary audience is close to 40 million mostly kid players. Young kids generally don't care about OS options and use whatever PC their parents buy, which will mostly be Windows. Further, even Windows PC players are in the minority, with close to 75% of users playing on mobile devices. Linux would always be a minority option. In the case of Roblox, it would be the minority option of a minority platform. Not really the type of thing the company is going to throw money at while they're supporting 4 other platofrms: Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android. All of them more accessible to their audience. Disappointment in their choice not to develop for Linux is natural, but it's a fairly reasonable choice on their part to avoid increasing their platform & build maintenance requirements by 25% for an exceptionally small number of users that would refuse to use a different OS.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  I expected it to be available on RaspberryPI.
  - dolmen 5y ago
    Windows is available on Raspberry PI.
michaelbrave 5y ago
More than half of their player base (like 60%) play on mobile, so I image it's just not a big priority to them.
washadjeffmad 5y ago
"Linux-native" is an outdated mindset. With tools like WINE and Proton+DXVK/D3DVK / SteamPlay, software developed on Windows is in all practicality platform agnostic. After more than a decade, we know the cost of supporting Linux native builds seems to be the sanity and good will of the devs. For indie and small teams, it's literally taking food out of their mouths asking them to use resources fixing obscure bugs from a vocal minority that they could instead put towards developing new content or planning their next projects. I get the sentiment, but really, we won the lock-in war. It's kinder to ask devs to stick to what they know and are comfortable with, and if they want to build with SteamPlay in mind, then we all win.

2Gkashmiri 5y ago

i recently tried to install amoung us exe on phoenecis play on linux. there is this starting bug that is caused by shaders. i tried a few fixes but none worked. It looks like i need to wait for 6.11

abledon 5y ago

So for the most part, has roblox replaced most 'physical' building activities kids used to do in the 80s/90s/00s ? E.g. Lego/ going outside, building forts etc?

McGlockenshire 5y ago
Roblox is both a creation/building tool and a minigame building/playing tool. Both of my kids love playing minigames with their friends, but don't build anything. Minecraft scratches their building itch for the most part.
MattRix 5y ago
That’s mostly Minecraft, not Roblox. Lego is still super popular… and yes kids still do go outside and build forts. Also if you’ve never played Minecraft, it is amazing, especially as a social experience, and it is very much not just for kids.
whydoineedthis 5y ago
No, it has probably replaced most 'gaming' activities kids used to do in the 80s/90s/00s - like Atari, GameBoy, Nintendo, Sega Genesis, etc.

encryptluks2 5y ago

Cool I guess, but a bit disappointing that it isn't just natively supported by Linux. I thought the team at Roblox would at least have enough people that were interested in helping kids create that they would see the value in creating a native Linux client.

Animats 5y ago

"Wine 6.11 or a more recent version. As of June 19, 2021, this requires using a development release." That's an annoying problem with Wine. I submitted a bug report on the released version, and it was rejected because it wasn't on the latest development version. It's hard to install Wine in a local directory, so installing a version that didn't come with the Linux distro is iffy. (Someone is going to tell me it's really easy, just type all these command line commands. That's not what the instructions [1] say.) [1] https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_Installation_and_Configuration https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_Installation_and_Configuration

simion314 5y ago
Try Play On Linux, or similar tools. It has the ability to download wine versions, it has 6.11 and 6.11 staging but not the GE or other special patched ones.
jchw 5y ago
To be completely fair, it really isn't that bad, at least not compared to other software. In my experience the only notably annoying part is getting all of the dependencies that you want. After that, it's basically an affair of ./configure && make. If you are using Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora, you can probably use WineHQ's repo with the winehq-devel package. You can also find the dev dependencies listed on the Fedora page. On Arch, AUR has the wine-git package that should work. On NixOS or other distros/OSes where you have the Nix package manager installed, you can get an environment with all of the dependencies setup for you, although in that case, I will at least note that you don't get a multiarch build. The situation could be better, but given the heroic amount of ridiculous stuff going on in Wine, it's not too bad either. (Not sure how many pure C programs I've seen exposing MSVC C++ ABI interfaces, but Wine is one.)
- jbboehr 5y ago
  On debian derivatives, you can use `apt-get build-dep` to install all the compile-time dependencies of a package.
- swiley 5y ago

ddtaylor 5y ago

Someone needs to update https://lutris.net/games/roblox/ https://lutris.net/games/roblox/

lukego 5y ago

Hey what's a good way to engage with Roblox? My 6-7yo kids love it but I don't see them doing anything creative as they do with e.g. Minecraft. maybe they are just playing it wrong?

beermonster 5y ago
Maybe get them to play more creative games like Build a Boat. The platform is great but like any platform there are games which either do or don’t engage creativity. Another thing you could try is get an account and play along with them. A lot of games allow for private servers / areas where you can play. Get them to add real friends from their school and hookup on a web conferencing app. That really helps with team building and communication.
ohyeshedid 5y ago
If they're enjoying it, and do so regularly, are they really playing it wrong?
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  What’s the typical age at which we expect people to decide if they’re doing something for fun - or if they’re doing something to create? Does it matter if it’s inside the sandbox (e.g. SimCity) or outside the sandbox (e.g. Dreamweaver)? What if the sandbox is also a tool for exploitation of the user (i.e. microtransactions?) To share my own example - beyond SimCity and not-really-understanding-how-to-make-Age-of-Empires-maps when I was 10 years old - I don’t think I can say I was really using computers constructively until I was 12/13 when I was at the point where I actually understood what I was doing with my cracked copies of Macromedia and Adobe software - so if I’m using myself as a benchmark I wouldn’t stress too much about grade-school kids being newbs… …just please don’t repress them. And introduce them to the concept of creating their own things outside of closed platforms.
  - temp22334455 5y ago
    How do you distinguish between creating and honing a skill? Some of the best engineers I know were top-level video game players in their youth. Video games taught them how to get really good at something.

miked85 5y ago

I must be getting old. I am not sure I understand what Roblox even is.

shmerl 5y ago

Roblox developers weren't helpful at all.

duxup 5y ago

My son plays Roblox a great deal. It's fascinating the variety of games on there. He'll play a tank game that is pretty much a semi-clone of World of Tanks Blitz, but then the next day he's playing a sort of bug RPG / simulator. The variety is something that I don't see in the traditional game industry where a bug rpg / simulator probably wouldn't be a thing (anymore... sim ant..) but it somehow is in the Robox ecosystem.

SilverRed 5y ago
There are a few of these sandbox style games around. Garys Mod, Tabletop sim, VR Chat, and Pavlov VR are all games that are platforms for mods to transform in to brand new games.
- Jarwain 5y ago
  Even minecraft has these kinds of data packs now to support a variety of game modes. What's interesting is that roblox puts it front-and-center, it feels like the primary usecase, and I'd bet that nodding it feels more approachable compared to others
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    All of the games I listed are similar, Pavlov VR is my favorite and it comes with basically no game by default and everything is custom game modes implemented as maps from the steam workshop. I have no idea which one is easier from a creators perspective but from a player point, I absolutely love checking out the new maps and seeing a totally different way to play a FPS.
jay_kyburz 5y ago
When you say its a great deal I'm not sure what you mean. Its free to play, then attempts to suck money out of your kids for virtual currency. We have a hard rule in the house of no money spent on virtual items. My kids still love Roblox so there must be lots of fun to be had without spending money.

opan 5y ago

If anyone wants something like Roblox that is free (as in freedom) software and runs natively on GNU/Linux, check out Minetest. Similar blocky aesthetic, mods made in Lua just like Roblox, mod content only has to be on a server, so you can join without prior setup (unlike modded Minecraft, more like Garry's Mod and Roblox), and the game is also available on Android. Not just a similar game you play with other mobile players (the way Minecraft Pocket Edition was), rather the same real game with the ability to pick up where you left off on a computer and join the same server with the same mods using your credentials for that server. I'm sure there are fewer players and less content, but it seems like a more sane base to build on for your creative ventures. They're not after your money the way Roblox often is either.

MattReigns 5y ago

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