I’ll leave my questions and requests for the upcoming AMA, but I am quite happy to see transparency like this. It was often frustrating being left in the dark until RDC or a random announcement. Though I do hope that the roadmap will be expanded with more details and more specifics in the future.
While we’re on the path further improve transparency, I also hope that there will be more points in time to communicate. There are many things that developers would like to discuss and it would help a great deal if we at least got some sort of response. Whether it be something that’s being taken into account, something that’s already noted, or even if it’s not a priority at that point in time.
Lastly, looking at the current roadmap, I do hope there will be more in the ways of engine capability. All of these features are great and all, but Roblox is still lacking in other ways. I won’t write a whole list, but I will at least mention the lack of GPU API and no way to create custom shaders or effects. But if you do want a bigger list, here’s a related thread:
Maybe the reason that they don’t announce rather “negative” features in advance is because people will surely react negatively since they can’t stand change. Just like the new studio icons a few months ago, when they released, everyone hated them but now everyone’s used to it.
Is there anything about for example oncreasing light range and making lighting better in overall. It’s currently the biggest headache in roblox building and lighting atmosphere. If you try having one light illuminating a big room, it’s impossible to illuminate it with just single light, you have to place a lot of them just so it’s fully illuminated, which is why its a big headache. What happened that the FiB beta studio build got unlimited light range, while the original studio haven’t?
Well, they at least compensated it by giving us ability to use custom icons too, which community used it to make old icon set, which is nice, no longer have to use RSMM to have your own icons, the feature is built-in and you can frelly use it
As a Roblox developer, I would say easily that one of the biggest flaws of deving from Roblox is the iffy communication from Roblox about bug fixes or updates. This is a great addition that blows previous roadmap iterations out of the park. Thanks for this.
If they do allow all creators then they will have to charge 2500 Robux for normal users per hat, sure it might sound cheap but there would be less of a chance of seeing bootleg items.
While this roadmap is cool, it doesn’t actually address a lot of the things that I really wanted to know. I would really appreciate a more technical, in-depth roadmap on features that aren’t necessarily big, but mean things. For example:
I heard about shapecasts coming to Roblox a year ago through random devs with Roblox engineer contact. I never knew when they were coming, and honestly if I never learned about it I might’ve switched platforms. Shapecasting is a big deal to me, and I have big things I want to do with it.
Reliability types. This is something I know is coming soon-ish, maybe, but I have zero clue when to even expect it. I’ve heard Q2 or Q3 in 2023, but I don’t know if that’s true or not. This is something that’s also make-or-break for me.
Open-sourced documentation. This was mentioned in RDC 2022, and I haven’t heard about it since. It’s something I really want to know, because there’s a lot that could be improved in the documentation, and obviously that’s to be expected.
Concurrent HTTP request limit. This was a low number, 3, and I heard it was going to be increased through a friend of mine. I heard it got increased to 15 a while later. This wasn’t even announced- how was I supposed to know about it? It’s something that’s super good to know, and I need to write code around it.
Lua-based physics controllers. This is something I saw on the API diff, it’s huge, still is huge, and I had no idea when it was coming, just that it was coming.
When I say I want transparency from Roblox, this is what I want.
Unrelated to transparency as in future features, but we also have no “correct” channel to confirm technical details w/ Roblox staff. This is something that transparency is also needed in. If I wanted to know how large certain data types are across the network, I have to test it myself. I don’t even know if my tests show the full story. I have to stalk Roblox staff on the devforum to get incredibly useful knowledge about, well generally everything. There’s incredibly useful knowledge that straight up isn’t even on the Roblox platform because it was said by engineers. Example: zeux.io - Voxel terrain: storage
While this blog post isn’t a bad thing (it was a nice read), it would be REALLY nice to have this information officially documented. This can negatively impact developers: Who could know, without any external help, that reducing the amount of filled terrain, even if non-visible, would significantly help with memory usage.
And this is seen, well, everywhere. (huge as far as I know in this segment) There is no official documentation that says when a packet is dropped by Roblox, all network traffic will be halted. There is no official documentation that says using the new task library means your code will run after physics, as opposed to before physics with regular wait(). Lots of microprofiler tags are still undocumented: compare Tag Table | Roblox Creator Documentation to Roblox: MicroProfiler Documentation - HackMD. A lot of memory tags have literally no documentation or information on them at all.
TLDR: transparency is good everywhere, including the engine itself
