As a Roblox developer, it is currently frustrating to fine tune & update assets.
The current asset system does not let us to delete or preview images, and it is annoying to have to upload an image every time you want to see it used.
If you want to modify your images (e.g. the color scheme is just a bit off), you have to reupload them and create a new asset which you can’t remove.
A simple solution to this would be to allow us to preview local assets as images in studio.
For example, in the Image property of an ImageLabel, there could be a little button with an import icon that lets us choose a local asset to use. They would not need to work in-game.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, the design process will be much easier on both the developers and Roblox’s servers.
You can somewhat already do this by adding your own files to the content/ folder. Go to C:\Users\USER_NAME\AppData\Local\Roblox\Versions
find the correct version for studio, then open the “content/” folder.
Once you’re in there you can just add assets anywhere and then access them in game by setting ids to “rbxasset://my_file.jpg”
The only bad part about this is that when Roblox updates it deletes the old studio version folder and creates a new one effectively deleting your assets. I usually have a folder called “custom” stored somewhere else that has all my custom assets and then make a copy of it that I place into the content/ folder after every update.
If you put assets in the content files for Roblox you’re able to access them from studio using “rbxasset://“ but I agree that there should be a more official way to view assets locally.
That’s what I’ve done for a couple of years now - turn on ReloadAssets and stick a “custom” folder in the content folder.
Even though launching and updating studio is a bit of a hassle like this, I do a lot of texture work for VFX so the ability to instantly see texture changes is invaluable IMO. It completely gets rid of the delay between “I made some changes” and “let me see how it looks”.
It’d be great if there was something more official for this. I can’t imagine trying to do what I do without being able to refine textures so quickly.
It would be neat if someone made a program to handle this automatically:
Lets you “upload” files to the program, which puts a copy in the content directory
Lets you view all “uploaded” local files and their info
Lets you actually upload files and get their image ids
Would probably become the go-to tool for working with images in Studio. Test all your textures and images locally, then bulk upload them all when they’re finalized.
I think image assets might support uploading new versions, so maybe this could automatically update your existing image assets, too.
I’ve worked with auto-uploading tools in the past, and one of the APIs I saw suggested the ability to update an existing image. It’s not exposed in any UI that I’m aware of, but it might be implemented in the back-end meaning a tool like this could take advantage of it.
Gonna bump this, my inventory is full of textures and meshes that have slight issues with them that I’ll never use, even if I archive them it’s still quite a hassle. Using the locally stored method is also incredibly difficult to work with, so I would love to be able to preview assets in the Studio workspace before I upload them.
