[Beta] Announcing New Games in the Cloud

desserts_yumyum · June 25, 2021, 9:07pm

Hey developers,

Roblox, at its core, has always been a platform that enables our creators and players to co-create and co-experience engaging and immersive 3D experiences no matter where they are in the world. Our cloud platform has been a primary enabler of this vision and we are focused on making it core to our creation experience to accelerate efficiency and collaboration.

Today, we are releasing a beta version of a milestone along this journey: New Games in the Cloud. This enables our community to save their work-in-progress games to the cloud by default without needing to publish them first. We listened intently to your feedback from a previous version and have built this feature in a way that incorporates all our learnings.

Benefits

Cloud features available for saved experiences: Functionality that used to rely on your work being published, like Asset Manager, Game Settings and Team Create can now be used without having to publish your work - just Save it to the cloud! The Game is saved in the cloud until you decide to publish.
Save only what you want to save: No changes have been made to when the file is saved, if you open a template in Studio to perform some temporary/transient action (for example: opening a model just to look at it), you can do that without a new Game being automatically saved to the cloud.
Streamlined process to set ownership: You can choose whether the Game is a user-owned place or a group place when you decide to Save it to the cloud.
Your experiences are available everywhere: Saving to the cloud allows you to continue working on your projects no matter where you are, by logging into Studio on any connected computer - no need to manually copy files between devices. However, if you so choose, you will continue to have the ability to save to file instead.

Details

With this new feature, CMD + S / Ctrl + S will open up the Save (to the Cloud) dialog. If the file has already been saved, it will save to the original save location- the cloud or local files.

Additionally, you will notice some changes to the File Menu in Studio. We have simplified the options to Save, Save As which both save to the cloud and Publish and Publish As (which work as before).

FileMenuDevForum

The Publish dialog now includes the Playability options in GameSettings, giving you control over whether your place is open to the public, private, or only available to friends after publishing.

Two small changes to Recent Games tab on the Start page:

Each place now displays its owner
A search bar has been added in the top right, you can now search for places via owner

New experiences that are created via the website (Create - Roblox, click “Create New Experience”) will no longer be published, only saved to the cloud

To enabled this feature, in Studio go to File → Beta Features and select “New Games in the Cloud”

I’d also love to give a huge shoutout to @RainingSwordFire, @someT42, @SwirlTheNumbers, @tamtamchu, @ameowth07, @MoodyMandyMeow and @twberg for making this feature happen.

Feel free to let us know what you would like to see in the thread below!

Kairomatic · June 25, 2021, 9:13pm

icysleds · June 25, 2021, 9:14pm

This definitely resolves some issues; especially not needing to publish the game. Would it be increasingly difficult to publish the game, or will it stay in the same place?

CatzRule_81 · June 25, 2021, 9:14pm

This feature is great and all, but I think maybe some of us like saving to file instead of the cloud?
(please don’t ask why)

boworzo · June 25, 2021, 9:15pm

Great job once again, this is an amazing new feature. Although, I’m wondering that if you save it to the cloud, and you decide to publish it. Will a cloud saved version still exist or just the published version?

NINJAMASTR999 · June 25, 2021, 9:16pm

The post literally says that saving to file will remain as a dialogue option. Though hotkey changes (changing control+S back to local vs cloud) may be a nice touch.

nakoyasha · June 25, 2021, 9:16pm

You can still save places as files, they’re not gonna phase out local place files any time soon.

Brinker7 · June 25, 2021, 9:16pm

Please keep cloud saves and local saves separate, and still allow local saves. Roblox servers could be unreachable for several reasons which could possibly lead to many hours lost. Additionally, since Roblox Studio is still a desktop application, any cloud save should reference the cloud explicitly to avoid confusion.

p_rofessionaI · June 25, 2021, 9:16pm

You will still have the ability to save to file if you wish, as stated in the post:

Your experiences are available everywhere: Saving to the cloud allows you to continue working on your projects no matter where you are, by logging into Studio on any connected computer - no need to manually copy files between devices. However, if you so choose, you will continue to have the ability to save to file instead.

PeZsmistic · June 25, 2021, 9:17pm

I do have some concerns about this, however it’s nice to see such improvements.

It looks like the answer to the first below question is yes, Ctrl S works as it did before if working in a local file. If you open or save a local file, the Save option and shortcut will save directly to that local file, you won’t even notice anything has changed. Thanks for being mindful of this!

As I’ve said before elsewhere, I rely on saving local files because I do not trust the Roblox platform not to terminate my account by mistake and lock me out of my projects, perhaps permanently. It sounds like you’ve just made it more tedious and error prone for me to save to a local file while I am working. Does this remapping of the Ctrl S shortcut change behavior to always save locally if I have previously saved to a local file for the current session of Studio?

Also to note, this is not a solution to game settings requiring a published place to function. These settings should not require cloud functionality whatsoever. They’re shortcuts for instance properties. Other features as well should not be locked to a game instance, there are many benefits to changing this behavior (e.g. spontaneous bulk import) rather than just forcing people to shove games into the cloud.

FifthInfinity · June 25, 2021, 9:17pm

~~This is amazing, gone are the days of cluttering the develop tab with new places that I am only going to use for a few minutes to test something and need on multiple devices.~~
Actually with further thought and reading the comments of other developers, I have realized that this isn’t as necessary as a feature. I will still use it occasionally as I have often move where I develop or if I need to start a team create; though a flash drive is enough portability as is. Looking more into the wording of the post, isn’t quite clear if you are able to delete these games at a later time if you no longer need them or if it just won’t persist if you don’t save it at all. I have yet to test it out mainly over the fear that I won’t be able to delete it. In the end I will mostly stick to using my local files.

The rest of my unedited comment:

Though I still would love to be able to delete past published games. My inventory is full of these and about 2 of the hundreds of them are relevant. I know there is fear about someone breaking into a developer’s account and deleting all of their games but some simple checks and countermeasures could be put into place to prevent a game being deleted forever instantly.

Automationeer · June 25, 2021, 9:17pm

No thank you.

As a professional developer, local files are a must, especially for critical external tooling (as Roblox will never be able to provide resources to the extent that the community can and does). This doesn’t even begin to cover working when there is limited internet connection; which will become more frequent as developers and studios professionalise (which Roblox itself wants mind you)

Additionally, I easily open half a dozen baseplates that I use to test something and then close (without saving anything). I don’t need this to clog my already cluttered develop page.

Roblox should focus on making life easier for offline developers – especially as more moves to Game Settings (which is completely blocked off with offline files).

CatzRule_81 · June 25, 2021, 9:17pm

“Additionally, you will notice some changes to the File Menu in Studio. We have simplified the options to Save, Save As which both save to the cloud and Publish and Publish As (which work as before).”

You’re still saving to both local and cloud, I’d like it if I could save to only local instead of both.

CatzRule_81 · June 25, 2021, 9:19pm

Gotta agree with you.

Now I’m considering what’s going to be worse: the “new textures” crap that happened a few weeks back or this whole affair. At least this time they’re providing an option for us to turn the feature on or not, but still.

Elttob · June 25, 2021, 9:21pm

I don’t understand what problem this solves over the way this was previously implemented.

Sure, I don’t mind ‘Save To Roblox’ just being called ‘Save’. But why merge that and the option to save locally?

Just keep them as separate options; that way, we can easily map a keyboard shortcut to it if we want.

p_rofessionaI · June 25, 2021, 9:22pm

As a professional developer, local files are a must , especially for critical external tooling (as Roblox will never be able to provide resources to the extent that the community can and does).

You can still save your game locally to file if you wish, as stated above:

Your experiences are available everywhere: Saving to the cloud allows you to continue working on your projects no matter where you are, by logging into Studio on any connected computer - no need to manually copy files between devices. However, if you so choose, you will continue to have the ability to save to file instead.

Additionally, I easily open half a dozen baseplates that I use to test something and then close (without saving anything). I don’t need this to clog my already cluttered develop page.

You won’t have to save it. See here:

Save only what you want to save: No changes have been made to when the file is saved, if you open a template in Studio to perform some temporary/transient action (for example: opening a model just to look at it), you can do that without a new Game being automatically saved to the cloud.

Copycat4858 · June 25, 2021, 9:22pm

Not everyone is going to read this thread and know where to find Save to File. (at least if this ever becomes non-optional)

p_rofessionaI · June 25, 2021, 9:23pm

This feature is still in beta. You will have to enable it in Studio in order to use it:

To enabled this feature, in Studio go to File → Beta Features and select “New Games in the Cloud”

CatzRule_81 · June 25, 2021, 9:23pm

I’m more worried about when it is no longer a beta feature.

EDIT: Whoop, nevermind, just saw this post.

Evercyan · June 25, 2021, 9:23pm

This is a really nice feature and I’m glad the process of saving a game to Roblox is simpler than ever! I’ve had some places I wanted to save before like if I’m working on a UI set for one of my games, but I always thought it took a bit too much effort to have to go through the process of creating a place as if it would be used as a live experience, when I think most of our games aren’t actual games, so thank you so much for this!

Do enjoy the quality of life changes such as the search bar and the renaming of the options in the context menu for file saving, it was daunting to read through “SAVE TO ROBLOX… SAVE TO ROBLOX AS… PUBLISH TO ROBLOX… PUBLISH TO ROBLOX AS…” haha.

But as @PeZsmistic brought up, I do rely on saving to local files and I’m glad that you don’t have plans to disable this functionality as with the direction you guys have been going with the cloud I was scared to be at risk of not being able to save or load files anymore.

I do just want to say that I also heavily rely on local files to save historical versions of my game to easily compare versions since Roblox doesn’t offer an easy way to go through your version history with assigned versions you can add yourself. I actually have an entire folder filled with historical versions of my game and it would be a shame to not be able to access them anymore!

Another important reason for me to use local files is because I, along with many other developers, fear our accounts may be suddenly deleted for any reason, even if we had no intentions to do anything wrong (Say a model thumbnail that looked inappropriate in the preview, when in reality the model was safe!), so I want to make sure I’ll still have files of my game to re-upload and manage on a new account in case if that does happen. I would’ve lost some of my older games that meant a lot to me when I lost my old account if local files didn’t exist!