Back in July 2019, asset archiving was introduced as a tool to to help manage our assets and remove assets we don’t have the right to use. Two years later, there’s still a lot of items which can’t be archived. This can make it difficult, if not impossible for a developer to remove potentially infringing assets… Along with anything else they’ve uploaded as a kid, and wish to remove from the platform.
You can overwrite Models in Studio, but this is a tedious process which can’t be done directly on the Roblox site. The tools Roblox provides for publishing/updating Models were not intended for overwriting batches of assets.
With Images, you can archive them if they’re tied to a Decal or a Mesh, but there’s a lot of cases where unarchivable Images are created. Place thumbnails, Badge icons, Group emblems, and more. Even if you overwrite them, the original Image isn’t deleted.
Unions are a versatile tool, with some users going as far as finding ways to inject geometry data into them before custom Meshes were a thing! However, Unions happen to create their own IDs when published to a Place/Model, and this can cause some situations where users have unknowingly uploaded stuff they don’t have the right to use to their own account. I played around with some free model Sonic the Hedgehog unions I found, because I was amazed to see that this was possible, and only recently found out that this meant those unions were reuploaded under my name.
Being able to archive assets like these would be a relief, allowing me and other creators to continue to develop on Roblox knowing we’re not at risk of getting DMCA’d. I don’t wanna get in trouble with Nintendo over something silly like an image I uploaded for a Set I made when I was thirteen.
I want to bring up this feature request again with a different use-case. Over the past few years it’s been made a lot easier to upload assets. The Asset Manager widget lets us upload many images at once. We can also use the 3D importer to upload and automatically add assets to our inventory. But this also means it’s become a lot easier to fill your inventory with multiple (broken) iterations of the same asset.
In my case I have been experimenting with creating custom characters in Blender and importing them into studio to check if they work well in-engine. I’ve had to iterate on the character quite a few times and anytime I upload them through the 3D importer I forget to uncheck the ‘Upload to Roblox’ checkbox. So now I have quite a few models in my inventory I cannot remove and I won’t ever be using them because they all have problems I fixed in later iterations.
These models are (literally) a waste of space and I would love it if I could archive them to clean up my inventory.
i also would like to bump this post again because i was just encountering a similar problem earlier, and it’s strange that we haven’t gotten a seemingly simple addition yet. i like to keep my assets organized, but as it stands now we can’t really do that for certain asset types and it ends up being really unintuitive.
for example, importing .fbx models that contain animations in the 3d importer will automatically upload them to roblox unless you uncheck them, which creates excessive and very annoying clutter that you simply cannot get rid of, which is already on top of the amount of models created from reuploading assets (which you will inevitably have to do to make changes on them). i’ve uploaded over twenty of the same animation just making iterations because i was unaware it was uploading it every single change i made to the mesh.
likewise, i use the packages feature a lot in my projects, and i will sometimes want to deprecate/remove certain features and i’ll end up with a bunch of unused packages that can slow development when i’m actually trying to look for a specific package. being able to archive these assets would be very helpful in cleaning up the inventory, especially for ones under groups.
cmon this could be added just by giving us the api to do this it would take 40 mins for a average-skilled web/api developer, this feature is already coded on the server side, as you can just archive or remove the data and it can literally save roblox (as a company) money
small bump because this issue is still relevant, but for anyone looking, the blender plugin can help to streamline the process and (i believe) reduce the overall assets uploaded during the revision process
for uploading meshes, you can create a new template in the 3D Importer with Upload to Roblox off, and set it to the default template so you won’t forget to turn it off
as for animations, you could upload new animations to an unused one, effectively overwriting its contents, and just renaming the animation to fit it, but it’s a bit of a tedious method
these are all band-aid solutions, however, and at least archiving assets (fully deleting them would be even better) needs to be something that the developer is allowed to do
