Thank you Roblox, Nick, and Tian for this update. I look forward to seeing Roblox as a platform becoming better than it was before.
I will be happy to help in any way I can to ensure Roblox delivers quality products in the future.
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Thank you for asking about good changes for development
New updates is good of platform to more some issues, they should better have new create experience to help their users of progress for product, and their new plans about devs team in new process to making even steps for some information!
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My guess it, like everything, file formats will be backwards-compatible. So even if a new format is received the old one will work fine. Just how word works with both .docx and .doc, with doc just having formatting issues but working fine.
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The “Create Tab” was mandated today. Its a downgrade. It sandboxes the interface, RIP URL navigating. There’s no search option. The landscape of 1080 goes to waste. A lot of real-estate is unused in the name of “modern sleekness”. Just big fonts with a lack of actual content occupying the screen.
Uploading audio was a little claustrophobic nightmare for us today.
I hope this management discourages expensive remakes of perfectly ok web 2.0 systems and interfaces in the name of new-ism.
“Team Create Default” “Forced inApp Browser” “Audio Permissions” “Create Tab”
Stop nerfing/idealizing everything.
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Nods sagely
Good stuff. What’s on the roadmap?
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Thank you so much! It’s heartening to hear this sort of response from Roblox after such significant community feedback.
One thing I’d like to see is for Roblox to open source more of its internal development frameworks and tools. This can be without any clear maintenance commitment, but things like storybooks, developer UI frameworks and specs, and other tools used to accelerate the development of Roblox can really only help Roblox—they’re not useful outside of Roblox’s ecosystem.
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Yes, I think them releasing things such as whatever UI Components they use on their studio plugins would be amazing for developers to use to create interfaces that are familiar to users and match the existing layout of Roblox.
As well as things such as official studio plugins so we can make modified forks of them for our own purposes. This could be useful to add features to systems like the animation editor to make it work better for your specific game.
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I 100% agree with this, I’d love to see more open source internal development modules.
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This is certainly a step in the right direction, and I applaud you and the entire team at Roblox for taking it.
Several developers in this thread have mentioned that what they would like to see is an opening of Roblox’s .rbxm binary format, and while I’m all for that I’d like to add the following:
A lot of the tools mentioned here serve the singular purpose of integrating with the common developer ecosystem. All programmers of all types are using open-source or open-protocol version control systems like git, and Roblox may be one of the few major platforms where this still can’t be done reliably. Tools like Wally are used by developers because Roblox still forces us to require libraries by absolute path, instead of having proper import and update systems, and the ability to require by library name.
We can all make this process easier by integrating Roblox with these tools, instead of trying to re-invent the wheel with built-in custom source control, or packages; which have been a great addition to builders, but feel like a step-back to programmers with prior experience with established tools.
Making Roblox a collaborative ecosystem where developers can build open source code that can easily be integrated can be the greatest leap this platform has ever had in my 15 years of experience with it.
But we need you to take the first step.
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+1 for this. Roblox is, in effect, the largest studio on the platform because it uses its own platform internally; so it’s had to solve unique, platform-specific problems to a professional standard. Would be very helpful to developers and also demonstrate Roblox’s commitment to empowering developers.
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I did not understand all this because I am an Arab and I do not know how to speak English, but I know a little bit, but I understood this speech like my name
I understood that the files are easy and greatly developed
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All we want is the ability to use Roblox Studio without a need for an internet connection.
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one small step for robloxians, one giant leap for robloxian kind.
now time to pray they stick to their word
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Something I’ll add to the conversation as someone who has been observing the relationship between Roblox and its power user community for a long time.
There’s always been a major disconnect between product leadership and what’s in the best interest of both Roblox and its developer community. Unofficial tools like rojo came into existence because product was insistent on all infrastructure and systems used by developers being built in-house with all of the backwards compatibility nuances and scuff hidden underneath flashy UX products. The resulting dynamic was the community having to navigate through this scuff ourselves, reverse engineering the specs by hand, and writing thousands of lines of code to interop with Roblox’s existing formats.
Now granted, the situation is a bit more nuanced and complicated. Roblox’s formats are not super friendly or stable in their current form. It has been an upkeep nightmare to create software that inter-ops with these formats. Given the limited engineering resources to clean up these problems, I can’t say I blame Roblox for focusing more on product and user experience rather than the actual toolset needs of external developers.
Far as I see it though, the time for excuses has passed. This problem is not going away, and I’d rather see Roblox develop flexible public specs for their file formats that take inspiration from what the community has built so far. You shouldn’t need a computer science degree to create software that interops with the engine. Not everything has to be in-house developed, all we ask for is a stable flexible spec to build upon.
Undertaking everything I’ve done over the years personally has lead to burnout, both on my part and from talented engineers like lpg, who wanted Roblox to take this direction all along while he was working at Roblox. Instead… we got packages, and those have been sitting in a weird limbo for the past 2-3 years without any stable conflict resolving for modified package forks. Roblox tried to add their own merge conflict resolver for drafts in studio, and it’s just like… why? Does it really need to be an in-studio thing when it could just use industry standards like git?
If Roblox really wants to be the metaverse platform, it needs to open its guts up for people to build upon and stop running from these existing file spec problems. I trust the new blood at Roblox will know what to do, I just hope leadership is willing to listen this time.
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Adding onto this, I think this is a great opportunity for Roblox’s Product team to get aligned with the DevRel team about best practices and strategy around how to communicate about product updates and features, and furthermore how to talk about actually following through on them. It seems like, in the past, communication has always just been laying out plans and not detailing their execution, which leads to a lack of follow-through and product features therefore becoming dead-on-arrival or facing backlash because it’s not clear how they fit into the bigger picture.
Additional communication around why Rojo is a taboo topic and the lack of official support for it would also be pretty great.
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Maybe think about giving us Offline studio.
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I like this announcement but I remain cautiously optimistic. 
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If you open a Roblox Model (RBXM) file in Studio (drag/drop into Workspace), and export the root node of your model instead as a Roblox Model as Xml (RBXMX) then you can open it and edit it in any text editor. The same is true of a place AKA “Level” file (RBXL / RBXLX).
The main difference between the XML form which is human readable and editable vs the compressed binary form is the size of the files. We store them compressed by default to save space and bandwidth because Roblox stores millions of these files in the cloud, but the engine code to load the files works with either form, and Studio will happily do the conversion for you.
Hope that helps!
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I think they’re aware, what he’s looking for is an official public documentation spec for both formats, or a newer format that Roblox is comfortable making public.
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To add to the above, RBXMX is functionally useless for games of a respectable size because the file size becomes absurd and load times also become absurd.
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