It has been a long journey, people. A long journey.
In the beginning, there was no notion of space (or spaces) in ROBLOX. When I joined the company in June 2006, the only playable place there was was Crossroads. Then we allowed the users to host their own multiplayer instances: independent worlds of their own design; shards of a larger reality. This momentous decision lead to the creation of universe that is, in a very real way, infinite. New games are being uploaded to ROBLOX.com faster than you can load them. You will never see them all.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, Teleportation: an ethereal link between two distant locales, ignorant of the base substrate of the ROBLOX website. The fractured infinity of the ROBLOX universe will be made whole again. The space between our worlds has been annihilated.
Teleportation for Beginners
- First, grab a copy of the Teleporter model.
- This will make it appear in the “My Models” section of the Insert Panel in ROBLOX Studio
- Insert a teleporter wherever you want in your level
- By default, this teleporter goes nowhere. You need to configure it so it knows where to send people! See directions for this step below…
- Congratulations! You have a teleporter that will send people from level A to level B.
- For best results, place a second teleporter in level B that allows your players to return to level A. Without bidirectional teleporters, ROBLOXians can easily get lost!
Configuring the Teleporters
There are three settings inside the teleporter model for you to play around with. These allow you to modify the behavior of your teleporter with no scripting knowledge!
PlaceId – This is the ID of the ROBLOX place you want the teleporter to send people to. This is the only setting you must change to make it work. You can find the ID for a place in the URL for that place’s page. For instance, Crossroads is PlaceId 1818.
DestinationSpawnName – You can program your teleporter to send a player is a specific spawn location in the destination level. For instance, the teleporter pad in Crossroads has a spawnpoint in it named “CrossRoadsSpawn”. If you set PlaceId to 1818 and DestinationSpawnName to “CrossRoadsSpawn”, players traveling through your teleporter will spawn on top of the teleporter Sorcus placed in Crossroads (instead of at a random spawn point).
ThisSpawnName – This is basically the address of the teleporter. You can set this to something like “TeleporterInSecretBase” and then teleport people there from another level by using this as your DestinationSpawnName.
Teleportation for Scripters
If you are a scripter, you don’t have to use our teleporter models. You can build your own! Here are the two function calls that you can make:
game:GetService(“TeleportService”):TeleportToSpawnByName(placeId, spawnName)
game:GetService(“TeleportService”):Teleport(placeId)
Important: these calls will only work from inside a LocalScript. Take a look at the code in our teleporter to see how it’s done!
Personal Note
It has been my extreme pleasure to present this particular feature to you guys today. Back when there were only 4 of us working at ROBLOX, sometimes Dave and Erik (the guys in charge) would leave Matt and I alone for the day and we would secretly work on teleportation! I’m psyched that it is now part of ROBLOX! Have fun experimenting!
- Telamon
