I’ve heard the words before, but the concrete commitment to supporting local file formats is a great first step. Thank you for hearing us!
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Glad to hear that ROBLOX is taking some action on Community Feedback, which is a critical aspect & we expect that you’ll be able to keep us up to date by keeping that promise 
I personally hope, that this process can continue onwards to establish better transparency towards us as Developers; and that we’re not left out in the darkness due to a huge lack of proper communication/transparency, which results in negativity over time 
Communication is key!
Hoping for the best from Nick, Tian, and the rest of the Engineer Team! 
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This is great to hear, the last few major updates to the platform have had some issues, and transparency should help everyone who uses the platform have a better experience!
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Welcome to the team! Does this mean roblox developer roadmap will be updated again?
Also, I want to share my thoughts about transparency. You all should be more open to smaller creators, more like the bigger ones because we make up half if not most of your community, and we’re being treated like crap.
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Immensely grateful for Roblox rolling back changes & listening to the community when it comes for critical pieces of feedback.
Bit of a side question, would it be possible to know what happened with the official Roadmap? Will there be plans to bring it back, or will release notes stay as the main form of information pertaining to new updates?
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I want to deeply thank you for listening, it’s great to actually get a response to these matters.
Ultimately Roblox needs to understand why these tropes exist regarding offline use and I see that here. All three points today are great steps, but more deeper and long term change is needed to stop the intense battle between devs and Roblox. Ideally Community Feedback should be part of the decision making process so that these problems are solved during the decision cycle and not after resources are put into rolledback ideas because you didn’t get a team of devs into the proccess.
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Looking forward to see where the team goes with this. It’s highly beneficial to be given access to this information, even if it is subject to change over time. It’s much more difficult to work with no information vs some information!
Hopefully more details with regards to these high-level keynotes will come soon. There’s a lot of areas where we are left guessing and I would love to see these voids filled via collaborative & open communication.
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Hopefully you deliver on this promise, so that you can ensure that all of us developers can have a good time here!
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Faith has been restored! Thank you – look forward to hearing more from you guys! 
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Thanks for finally opening up about this.
I hope this isn’t just a move to shut up the developers that will get rolled back silently internally. Keep your commitment to this, its not a good idea to keep your main profit drivers in the dark, because they will move elsewhere given the choice.
Roblox needs its developers if they want to stay afloat.
Let us have a say in the decision making process behind features, I mean thats what the #roblox-surveys channel is for, use it!
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This is incredible, I’m glad to see our concerns being heard and addressed, even listened to!
I think we have to thank @Elttob for this conversation starting and the wonderful folks at Roblox DevRel for actually affecting change 
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I’m one of the principle authors of Rojo’s binary file spec document and the only author of Rojo’s attribute binary format spec and the in-progress XML file format spec. Given that I’m only aware of one other completed spec for each of these (written by @Anaminus and hosted here), I think I’m uniquely qualified here.
At the moment, the binary format does not respect versioning and may change at any moment. Notably, it recently gained support for zstd compression but there was no indicator of that anywhere in the format. It has not yet been a problem for Rojo or the related ecosystem, but should Roblox begin utilizing that compression outside of their own models, it may be.
I would like an assurance that this will not happen going forward. Whether it be that we are given a chance to comment on major changes of this sort or that we are simply given notice, it would be greatly appreciated if we no longer had to reactively update our implementations of the file formats.
I would also like to know how far Roblox’s commitment to supporting the community in this manner goes. In the future, would Roblox be open to hosting an up-to-date spec document for the file format, including binary blobs such as Attributes and Terrain?
Regardless, this is good news and I’m looking forward to Roblox carrying through with their promise.
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I can hardly take credit for what is ultimately a community response!
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THIS RIGHT HERE! THIS IS THE POST I NEEDED. I’m glad you guys at Roblox actually still listen to the community and care. I cannot wait to see what we have for the future!
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It’s great to know that Roblox will be here listening for our input now Nick and Tian. Listening to the community and what they have to say will surely benefit the Roblox Platform In a positive manner. Thanks’ for informing us about this wonderful change we’ve all been waiting for.
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I don’t see it happening any time soon but an opening up of the binary format would be really useful for external tooling, even if it’s not the sourcecode itself, a documentation of it would be extremely useful.
Rojo lacks several features that are in the actual spec, 0x1D (lol), the Font type and zstd are to name a few, I dont believe zstd is really a problem, since it looks like its only used by Roblox for packing their source code.
Regardless, even though I heavily doubt it, open source binary spec?
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Really crossing my fingers and holding my breath, we’ve been deprived of communication on this front for an extremely long time, leading to community uproar after uproar with bizarre unexpected changes with no justification given, or else complete silence on impactful issues. Absolutely love Roblox extending an open hand here, and praying positive change comes as a result.
Thank you especially for putting to rest the fears that Roblox was planning to move to an always-cloud model and/or shove local development into the back seat. Local development is critical to many people and it’s great that Roblox also sees and acknowledges this.
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As someone who has been fighting and advocating for change for a while now, this is a step in the right direction. Reliable two-way communication is paramount for Roblox and its developers, it is a part of the symbiotic relationship that has made the platform what it is today. I look forward to and hope that this announcement will become more than just words on a devforum post.
With that being said:
What about major issues brought up in the past by the developer community that were never addressed or responded to? To list off a few recent major ones:
- Revenue % problems in plugin marketplace and UGC marketplace, creators not earning fair income from their work. @Elttob has had many discussions with folks internally about this, and it’s never really gone anywhere meaningful. This post covers the issue with current UGC %s.
- Various discovery issues, surfaced across many devforum posts. E.g. this post only received a response from a PM due to internal pinging on slack. Not a lot of change has been seen or felt since that response, and in some cases things have actually gotten worse.
- Various developer-facing programs that positively serve the community, have been shut down. When they are shut down, there is often with no rational explanation why other than some pre-canned PR quote, that explicitly avoids answering real developer questions. Some examples include things like the developer awards program, which was silently halted about a year ago with no notice, or the developer stars program being shut down, which many developers protested against, the accelerator program being shut down, etc. While some shutdowns have been explained and are being handled promptly (e.g. playfab program), most of them are just seemingly ignored by Roblox, with no response or dialogue being given, developers being told what they would like to hear, etc without problems actually being fixed.
The list goes on here… how do you folks plan to handle these? How will major issues that have been brought up in the past that were ignored / remain unfixed, be addressed? The reason behind the developer community’s backlash is not because of one team create feature, it is much larger than that. It is a “death by a thousand cuts” scenario, which was caused by large issues being hot potato’d internally until things exploded.
I truly hope this is the beginning of positive change, but unless the above and more are actually addressed in good-faith, I do not see this leading anywhere long-term.
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At the moment, support for Font is pending (the author of the PR had a vacation so it stalled for a week). We intentionally omitted type 0x1D from the spec a long time ago because it wasn’t useful to end-users because they couldn’t at the time generate Luau bytecode. Opinions have changed however and we’re trying to move towards documenting everything regardless of use. We probably still won’t support it in Rojo, but it’ll definitely get added to the spec file in the future.
Wrt zstd support, it’ll come when it’s important but it’s a low priority right now because Roblox doesn’t generate models with it outside of their own internal models.
I don’t think an open sourcing of the binary format itself is even possible, but an open source spec file with an RFC process for major changes would be my dream come true.
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Great update. I’m very happy to hear we’ll be getting more transparency for updates from now on.
Personally, I would suggest hosting polls for updates, or prioritizing community opinion more-so over corporate when it comes to the development side of things. The last thing we want is another “dramatic” update, like with the new materials, the animations, or the audio update.
This is an excellent first step and I really hope we can go beyond this in the near future.
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