As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to compare two place explorers side-by-side
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my game / my development experience because my development workflow includes having multiple “test places” and a “game place”. The game place is where the players play; it’s the final product. The test places are where developers for the game work on aspects of the game and get them ready to go live. The issue arises when devs work on multiple updates and work at varying speeds. For instance, Test place 1 implementing framework changes becomes outdated since Test place 2 only needed to add a dark theme to the UI. Of course, test place 1 would take longer to complete, and so test place 2 is published to the live game but test place 1 still doesn’t support the dark theme because it’s outdated.
Something that may be able to fix this would be a comparative feature for .rbxl files or game places. Think packages for a moment. Packages allow devs to compare scripts on different versions of the package. If that same functionality could be implemented to allow for two explorers to be compared (preferably without opening the entire place file because that would take forever) it would streamline the ability to identify outdated parts of the test place which has a larger update being worked on in it.
I completely agree. This request needs more attention. My average session time went down a few minutes from one day to the next, and I need to know everything that was changed.
This is something we hope to support eventually but it’s a massive undertaking that involves changing some fundamental architecture of both the engine and Studio application.
Honestly my workaround right now is just exporting .rbxmx for both versions of the place and then using diffchecker. It’s a pretty clunky workflow but when it’s necessary (and if the file size is small enough) it can be very powerful. No need for a 3d viewport or anything - in fact, my feature request was almost fulfilled with the “compare package versions” feature, although it was applied differently.
Picture a feature using this UI, but instead of a singular package version being compared to another version, the entire datamodel of the place is being compared to the datamodel of a different place version - or even a datamodel from another place all together.
While I understand this was a misunderstanding of the request. being able to summon multiple properties panels would also be really helpful. Unity Engine currently lets us summon any amount of inspector panels we want and lock them to view a specific instance that we asked each inspector instance to. ROBLOX has been missing this for some time, but it’ll be really helpful for viewing attributes of another object that you’re scripting to spawn in while also viewing your script’s attributes/properties and your script.
I’d argue it’s a pivotal QoL feature of game development that’s been sadly missing for far too long.
