Currently, asset management is scattered across different places within Studio, such as Toolbox inventory and Game Explorer, as well as on the Roblox website. Existing asset management is also showing its age. These problems include:
Non-deterministic Sort Order - Items are listed in an unpredictable order every time in Game Explorer, making it harder to find items.
Asset Filtering - It is impossible to filter for assets in Game Explorer.
Asset Preview - Game Explorer does not provide preview for assets or additional details.
Scalability - Game Explorer fetches all assets at once, and as the number of assets continue to grow, this can increase place open times by over a minute for games with large amounts of assets.
Over the past year, we have spent considerable effort to address these problems through our new Asset Manager. In addition to providing a deterministic ordering, filter functionality, asset preview, and the ability to scale to games with thousands or more of assets, Asset Manager also lays the foundation for future features such as searching for assets, managing account-level assets, and user-defined organization with custom folders, sorting, etc, which would not be possible with Game Explorer.
Your feedback during our beta period and rollout was invaluable, and we have worked hard at implementing many of the features you have suggested with more planned down the line!
Below is a quick summary of the major changes coming in this iteration of the Asset Manager, some of which are new improvements over the first iteration.
So what is the full list of features in Asset Manager now?
Usability Improvements - We revisited the design to make Asset Manager more usable. You can now toggle between grid mode, which allows bigger previews for assets, and list mode, which presents a more compact view.
Alphabetical Sorting - Assets will now be listed in consistent order, this will later be improved to give users the ability to customize how assets are sorted.
Filtering - There is now a search bar which allows you to filter assets. We have plans to fully extend this to search for assets that arenât loaded.
Multiple ways to navigate - We added a tree view + main view to give you multiple ways to navigate. The tree view is a little sapling right now, but we have plans to grow it out in the future.
Consistent Workflows - Feel free to configure your assets, and check them out with the 3D Preview â just like you would in Toolbox!
Bulk Import - We have a new view which contains a list of assets that have been recently imported and allow for easier access. This list persists per import session. We plan to eventually replace this with custom sorting of assets e.g. name, recently updated, etc.
Multi-select - You can now use ctrl or shift to select multiple assets
Quality of Life Fixes i.e. duplicate packages or only one package shows up, root place having same icons as others, missing Linked Scripts functionality, extraneous error messages in the output window, and thereâs more!
These improvements will be available to everyone as we roll out Asset Manager to all users. Thank you for your support! As you can see, your feedback is invaluable to us as we chart the course for the future of asset management in Studio.
Are there plans to add PBR/Surface Appearance support to the Bulk Importer?
As far as I am aware, in its current state, the Bulk Import is limited to automatically applying a diffuse map to the âTextureâ property of a MeshPart; importing and applying normal maps and roughness maps, etc to a MeshPartâs SurfaceAppearance must still be completed manually.
Having functionality similar to Blenderâs add-on Node Wrangler to automatically detect and apply textures by name i.e. âmetalnessâ, âroughnessâ, âbumpâ, ânormalâ, âalphaâ would be a massive QoL improvement for modelers using PBR materials.
Iâm seeing a banner on the audio upload portion of the develop page that âAudio uploading has moved to Studio!â, which seems to indicate that audio and maybe other asset types will soon be exclusively uploadable via asset manager. This is a problem for my workflow because I spend most of my time editing offline files, and the asset manager is not available unless the place is published.
Will asset upload via the asset manager be available for unpublished files, for example to simply upload assets to my account without a strict game association? In general will assets that are not game-associated continue to be supported?
Also, I am seeing that linked scripts remain broken in the asset manager, still only accessible via the old game explorer.
Great to see Asset Manager is finally becoming the all-in-one utility for asset management.
I assume users will also be able to upload content from create.roblox.com?
This is really cool! I really like the design of the menu, and that you can change item aliases!
However, will badges, animations and perhaps PBR ever make an appearance in the asset manager?
Either way, really cool that this is back, I love it!
EDIT: Oh also, will we be able to turn off the automatic asset naming? What I mean by this is:
When you upload an image, the asset name will be âImages/(asset name)â. Will we be able to just make the asset name be, well, the asset name? (Its kinda a nitpick, but my OCD reaaaaally dislikes it)
Thank god! The days of switching from studio to website to studio are gone(at least for assets)! The UI looks pretty clean, and I can see bulk import coming into great use very soon. I do have one question, wouldnât filtering be equivalent to the old asset managers search bar?
Currently badges and developer products live in Game Settings under the Monetization tab in Studio. If you have any usability issues please let me know and I can forward it.
Sorting assets by upload time is an absolute must for my workflow, and it seems that the new asset manager does not have this feature, while the old one did. Would love to see a sort-by-date implemented so I can work with uploading assets again
@smoothiecriminals Will this be made where you can view without publishing the place?
I realize its only a click of a couple buttons to publish it, but It would be much more helpful to not have to scroll through settings, just to add something in your game.
Im assuming that gamepasses will also be added. Will dates and times be added to the import history?
Iâve also had issues with importing since the roll out, and when using the new asset manager to import, UVs dont appear to be applied to meshes when batch imported from 1 obj. Didnt have this issue prior when using the same method
Last time the Asset Manager was released and pushed into beta there were issues where not every assets in a category were showing up. I am still having this issue. I have a lot of packages within my game and I am unable to use the âUpdate Allâ (mass-updated) feature because many of my packages do not even show up in my package list.
All of the packages in the game are created by me (user) and the game is owned by a group. I thought this would be an issue but the asset manager still shows around half of the packages all owned by meâŚ
We have over 60 places in the game so Iâd appreciate having the ability to update packages rather than opening 60 studio instances to update anything
Game/Universe Id: 204387960
EDIT: I figured out that itâs an issue with the ui code, you have to make the Asset Manager window smaller so that it canât fit all the elements on the same screen. From there, it will fetch the next few elements because you are âscrollingâ to load more packages
There is one singular issue that makes using this asset manager for me a very unenjoyable experience.
I load in A LOT of meshes for my models and have to place all of them in workspace with location to construct my full model. Itâs a minor thing, but HIGHLY annoying, to suffer having to go through my lists of 300+ meshes and individually click every single mesh while holding Ctrl just to place them in the workspace. I do not enjoy the carpal tunnel inducing asset manager.
Give back the ability to just hold Left Click and sweep over the list to mass select items again. I donât believe that will be a hard thing to do, and it will make me actually want to use it because right now I want nothing to do with it for this singular reason already.
Edit: I am half brained sometimes, apparently you can use shift + select to select larger amounts of objects. I will still say hold and drag is more intuitive and it feels weird that its changed since its just so common of a function for selecting. Also pardon the angry tone of my original post I was having a rough time with a project at the same time I ran into the problem, and forgot the other method for selecting multiple objects because I very rarely use it.
Or perhaps group meshes? Then you can insert the group or double click the mesh to access it similar to a folder so you can see the individual meshes that make up the group. Always good to see room for improvement. Would be a great feature request.
