As a developer, I want to do my final testing (staging) with multiple people in the same environment that my production is hosted in (same datastores, same asset permissions, etc), but I cannot currently easily do this because you can only turn on/off Team Create for an entire game at once, and not only for the staging/testing place in the universe.
The reason for wanting Team Create on the staging place is because of the way how we distribute assets to the universe places: we update a model that contains all the prefabs/code and this model is loaded and unpacked by all universe places to run the game logic. The places themselves only contain the geometry.
In order not to clobber up each others’ changes, Team Create should be active on the Staging place, such that we all instantly get each others changes and don’t overwrite each other when adding the prefabs. (Code consistency is not a problem since this is synced in from an external source of truth, so Studio isn’t our source of truth when code is concerned, only prefabs.)
However, I’d prefer not to have Team Create enabled for all the other places. It seems dangerous to me as a developer to do this because I don’t seem to have any control over when Team Create publishes changes, and we don’t want the production places to publish themselves when a builder or scripter is halfway through adjusting something or debugging (this could be fixed by not editing in production, but mistakes might happen), nor do we want the case where someone accidentally opens a place in Team Create, accidentally makes an edit, and then keeps the place open and have it sync into production.
Moreover, I might not want Team Create on in some places where I want to be able to easily revert versions, since Team Create has a habit of creating a new version in the log every so often (seemingly more than the times I deliberately press alt+P).
If Roblox would allow us to specify which places in a universe are Team Create and which are not, I could decide my own workflow better and prevent mistakes by unintentional edits / edits getting pushed while a change is being performed.
Thank you for providing this level of detail in your post. It really helps us understand the problems you are facing.
We have a large project in the works where you will be able to save games in the cloud (without publishing). This means that you won’t have to worry about Team Create’s auto saving behavior because it will not affect production until you explicitly publish. Expect more news about this in the coming months.
As for your concerns about Team Create creating frequent versions, this is a difficult problem to address. Because we are trying to support realtime collaboration, we need to have the server periodically save as long as developers are making changes to the game. One thing we might do to address this is allow you to label a specific snapshot version in order to find it later. Would this solve your particular use case?
Better labels on the version history would be helpful. Maybe automatic publishes can be labelled differently somehow. Right now every version is just a number, and there is no way to filter the version list, so I have to try several times to get to the version I wanted. (Plus, reverting also creates a new version, which worsens the problem because the list is shifted again.)
Thanks for the rest of your explanation, that does sound like it will fix most of my issues.