Collaborative Editing has arrived!

[coefficients]

All right stop

Collaborate and listen

Roblox is back with our brand new invention

A new feature done just rightly

Makes it easier to collaborate daily and nightly

Hey developers,

The holidays are rapidly approaching and we’re dropping some crazy gifts for our developers. We’re very excited to announce a new feature we’ve been working on for the better part of this year. It’s called Collaborative Editing and it’s going to revolutionize how you work with your teammates. It takes Team Create and adds on a new way for teams of developers to script together without interrupting each other, inadvertently breaking the game, or losing precious progress. Sounds epic, right? Well, get ready to have your mind blown.

Here’s how it all works:

SCRIPTS UNLOCKED

In the past, scripts would be locked for editing in Team Create. With Collaborative Editing, you can edit any script at any time - even if it is being edited by someone else on your team.

CHANGE IT, TEST IT, PUSH IT, PROFIT

Editing scripts saves them as drafts immediately and these drafts are only visible to you. Edit your script, test it with Play Solo to see if your changes work as intended (Play Solo uses the edited source in your drafts, Team Test uses the server version of the script), and then commit it to the server to update it for everyone in the Team Create session.

Guess what else that means: Scripts can be edited across multiple Studio sessions - start editing a script (draft created and continuously auto-saved), then shut down Studio for some downtime. Go back to Studio on the same computer and observe your drafts waiting for you.

OMNISCIENCE

In real-time, you will know who is editing a script and when they commit their changes to the server. You’ll also immediately know if someone deletes a script on the server that you happen to be editing - don’t worry your draft of that script is always retained so you can restore the script back into the Workspace.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST

At any time, you can compare the differences between your script and the latest version on the server to easily see what the differences are!

MERGE, EVERYBODY MERGE

This feature also comes with conflict resolution and merge tools:

• Real-time awareness of new commits and deleted scripts
• Identification of all conflicts between your drafts and the server’s version
• Conflict resolution by keeping your draft changes or the server’s version, or manual resolution by editing the conflicting code block
• The merged scripts are saved to your drafts, where you can test them Play Solo and commit the changes whenever you are ready

THE TRASH PILE

You’re easily able to discard your drafts without impacting anyone else’s work or pushing it to the server! Now you can vent your frustration with their code in blocks of comments and then toss away the draft as if it never happened. Like when I write an aside in a draft about @nsgriff trying to take over my announcement, but mine turns out waaaaay better than his. NOTE: DO NOT PUBLISH!!!

THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT (xD)

This is only the beginning. Going forward, we’re bringing you script history, batch commit, and rollback features. Stay tuned for more info about those!

Was that a lot to take in? Maybe a little too good to be true? Well, here’s a video demonstration.

Excited to jump in and turn this on immediately? Good! Here’s how:

1. Make sure your game has been published
2. Make sure your game has Team Create turned on
3. Navigate to Game Settings
4. Go to the Options tab
5. Turn “Enable Collaborative Editing” on!
6. Make sure you close out the Team Create place (and that everyone else has left)
7. After that, reopen the place and draft, merge, and resolve conflict to your heart’s content! The UI will appear as soon as you’ve made your first edit to any script

That’s all there is to it!

Huge thanks to all of the people who worked tirelessly to bring this feature to the platform. This wouldn’t have been possible without the efforts of @Subcritical_alt, @IcyTides, @vespa_rbx, @CycloneUprising, @chilliflakes19, @qmasterman, @tamtamchu, and @twberg. Oh, and @nsgriff for trying his hand at writing this announcement. That’s worth a gold star!

Let us know what you think of Collaborative Editing in this thread, we’re excited to hear your feedback!

Thanks,
Developer Relations

If you have a large request, please create a feature request and link it to this thread. A single post will not provide enough information to act on the suggestion or convince us to support it if we aren’t already

[Affenity (Visual)]

I’m just going to say this right now, what the heck!?!??

It’s Christmas before Christmas!??!?!

I’m not usually posting stuff like this on public announcement posts, but I must say that Roblox has taken a huge step forward to improve the developers’ experience of the platform.

Roblox helping the developers with updates like this one is something I really do love. It’s amazing how you continue with stuff like this.

It seems like 2019 is going to be a revolutionary year for Roblox, and I truly hope it will be closely followed up by 2020, (which is approaching). Please do not stop releasing great features, we need them!

[xonae]

Truly an amazing update, I can finally edit my scripts with friends while plastering ASCII art coefficients as comments.

Thank you very much for all involved, I’m gonna take full advantage of this and I’m sure many others will too!

[DevConX]

Now while I support this idea I also fear it, with this new feature, it poses a threat. Let’s use this scenario, so you’re working on a game with another person and you get into a disagreement. Can this person now go and delete the scripts that you are working on?

[TCtully]

Thank you for this information, Developer Relations.

I can hear a much quieter future with the absence of “Get out of my script, boye” being shouted. Now my team will have a cool, calm, and collected “Merge my script, boye”

I am very excited for this future.

[Automationeer (Eleanor)]

thanks developer relations! i can’t wait for more gifts!

I still prefer VS Code and bitbucket for collaborative projects, studio’s lacking- especially in the collaboration (programming) part. Thankfully, this is only the beginning.

Nether the less, this is still a brilliant update and I am very thankful for it!

The only dislike is different branches, but that’d be too difficult to support.

[Semaphorism (standalone_ecu)]

“git” to work as the devs say…

Is this only available for team create? I would love to use this without team create on, not sure if that’s possible, if not, is there plans?

[Sbss1111]

I’ve had a lot of issues with team create in the past, specifically with saving and not being able to have multiple people edit scripts. But now, these issues are fixed! Really motivates me to get one of my old team create games back together. The demo looks really good, and this was a necessary change. Super excited to try this out with all the other new updates lately!

[TalonMidnight (Talon)]

Very welcomed QOL change, confused as to why it took so long to ship though…

[Tobeqz]

Honestly I’m a little afraid this’ll make it worse if it it’s rushed. Praying it’s gonna be polished and scripts won’t magically disappear like I’ve experienced with some other collaborative coding tools.

[CodeJared (Code)]

This is amazing! Thank you guys so much. This is one of my favorite new features this year! Can’t wait to see what 2020 brings!

[jonofdoom]

This seems interesting. I’m curious to see how this will benefit us in the long run. I’ll give it a try myself.

[PlexFusion (PlexDev)]

Definitely a great update I’ve seen! Similar to .git and that’s something I like. Collaborative work is dream work for me. Drafts, commiting, ect. Very decent update! Every update is getting better and better! Thank you guys!

[Hexcede]

I love this! I was honestly not expecting diffs, merging, etc I was just expecting something like Google docs. In fact I think I might prefer this in some cases. Is live code editing planned? It would honestly be a dream for me to get something like that because I’ve wanted to be able to quickly show people code. It would make explaining things a lot faster when I can show them in real time without screensharing and have them run the code.

[Sbss1111]

That is a good point and I had thought about that right when I read the post. But, I’m hoping that they would have fixed saving if they were going to add features like drafts into it. If they didn’t fix the saving then I’m not sure how they could have built on top of it. But I guess we won’t really know until we try it out for a bit.

[Hexcede]

Well yes but you have drafts to work with as well. Before this was also just possible by deleting the whole script instance which would cause it to close in your studio.

[moosee]

SCRIPTS UNLOCKED

Ahhhh… what a joyous occasion this is! Next time someone needs some help with a script or someone wants to see what I have done I don’t have to close out of the script! Thank you so much!

[kinkocat]

100%, but that goes for anything you give someone access to.