Allow developers to save places as studio templates

As a developer, I often find myself creating places to serve as an in-game preview for commissions. For improved presentation, this involves applying a texture to the baseplate, adding a custom skybox, and tweaking the lighting. Although minute, the process of opening an old commission, and copy pasting the applicable assets is a nuisance.

As a quality of life improvement, I suggest giving developers the ability to publish places as templates. These places would be saved under the ‘New’ tab as ‘Saved Templates’ permitting developers to start fresh from their preferred template.

Preview

Currently developers must save templates to their computer locally (or utilize plugins? :thinking: ) to achieve this type functionality. Having a supported method in Studio would be a great addition.

I will admit, my use case is pretty insubstantial, however it could serve as a great tool and quality of life addition for builders and scripters who have a certain folder structure, lighting settings or building set that they prefer to use in all their projects.

103 Likes

I like this idea! I was literally about to make a plugin for this because I always have a default setup for new places. Would be awesome to have a built-in feature to allow custom templates.

Obviously, as you mentioned, you could just save your own files and use them as templates, but it would be cool to have the feature built-in too. Even if it just pointed to a directory with place files.

16 Likes

This is an awesome idea, and I’m surprised it hasn’t already been implemented.

I’m sure this would save developers loads of time, since they wouldn’t have to spend time messing around with lighting, or other things that would hinder them from actually starting their development.

It’d also be pretty cool if people could “upload” their own templates, and share it with other developers.

:+1: from me

10 Likes

Bringing this up for a more modern approach with the new Studio layout.

I think it would be amazing if we could create our own studio templates to quickly load up our own custom templates, kind of like Blender workspaces in some way. It would be much better and would negate much of the need for third-party plugins to set up our own templates.

If this issue is addressed, it would improve my development experience by greatly speeding up our workflow, and standardizing templates where it’s not just ones created strictly by Roblox would be amazing for more advanced developers to save time on importing many of our libraries or models for quick and standard development convention.

Maybe at some point, developers could even have a template section in the marketplace, like a building pack template, or rig animating template?


Examples

Custom Baseplate: Many developers, especially animators or builders, might prefer having their own baseplate they use for the creation of new games, or just to play around with some features they wanna work on. Some people might prefer the Classic Baseplate in case if it ever gets removed, or they might wanna use their own baseplate layouts and customize them how they wish.

Green Screen Template: The way I like to render game icons/assets is through Roblox Studio with the emulator and a green-screen skybox or SurfaceGui box encompassed all across the world. Instead of having to manually build them in my current place or open a new one to do it, and it’ll also negate the need of a local file. All I would have to do would be to open a new studio window, go to templates, and click my green screen template.

Scripting Template: Basically would act like a baseplate or an empty world, but you could have many of your standard script libraries already built into the place. For example, extended math and Vector3 libraries, or a common module to handle all of your gui components. No longer would we have to always import our libraries from other places or GitHub into each new place we create.

I’m sure there would be many more examples the amazing developer community could make up, but I think there’s a good few I would find very useful for development.


How it would work (developer’s proposal)

You could right click any of your published places in the Studio main menu, and under the context menu click ‘Save as template’. Once done, it’ll automatically appear under Studio Templates (preferably under a header). You can click it, and it’ll open the latest place version under a separate local file not attached to the original place. To remove it from the page, all you’ll have to do is right click again and remove from templates. It’ll be saved in the cloud, so you won’t have to worry about changing devices and not having your template there to start anew.

image

17 Likes

Given how the Start Page is just a collection of .qml files with a few HTTP requests, I dont see how this hasn’t been added already.

Im actually working on a game engine whose Template place has scripts strewn all over the place.

Maybe under New…?

3 Likes