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Roblox's Old Hidden Images

Dec 11, 2024

“Roblox.com is an example of a very good and consistently designed website!” — Said nobody, ever

For how popular Roblox as a platform is, you may sometimes forget how incredibly stitched together the website is. A great example of this, for those of you who have been on this website around 2017, you’ll likely remember the insane discrepancy between the design of the main website & the “Develop” tab.

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Funnily enough, this page shares a design language with the pre-2015 website. It also didn’t support dark mode!

Today, things seem to have marginally improved. The “Develop” tab (called “Create”) doesn’t blast your eyes with nostalgia from the 2010s (and the lack of dark mode), but it still doesn’t seem to be consistent with the rest of the website.

Offset SVGs: They are cool (and also unpractical)

While going on my usual nerd-esque activities (of examining Roblox.com’s HTML and CSS for fun), I noticed the kind of cool way they display icons. Instead of uploading a proper icon file for each one like mere mortals, they instead decided have a huge SVG spritesheet with lots of icons for the website. They will then use the background-offset CSS style to offset the SVG to properly display icons.

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Each icon on the right is taken from this big image on the left, isn’t that cool? The full image is loaded into every single icon slot, but is then cut down to only display the icon at a certain X,Y value.

But now, here’s the thing: This wouldn’t be the Roblox website without some glaring oversight relating to an old version of the site!

Ever wondered what a builer’s club limited unique 13+ item looks like? Well, wonder no more:

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This is the texture for the Limited tag you see on, well, Limited items. It looks like they thought to make a texture for every possible item type instead of stacking them near each other using something like a <span>. Amazing!

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And tweaking just one line of CSS, gets you this beauty. Isn’t that cool?

And this is just the tip of the iceberg that I could find. I all sorts of discontinued features using my limited web dev skills, even including a modernized version of the Tix logo!

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Really makes me wonder what other relics of bygone times Roblox.com has hidden in their source code in plain sight. Seems like despite their best efforts to erase their history, they really can’t get away from it!

Thanks to the 3 people who will ever read this post of schizophrenic ramblings. You guys are the best!