Creator Roadmap - AMA with Dan and Manuel

[coolguyweir]

Let’s just keep it simple, and I’m sure most if not all developers on Roblox are extremely interested about this:

Will DevEx rate increase?

I love all these features and stuff but there’s only so much that these features will do for the community compared to DevEx raise.
100k → $350 is kinda absurd. Yes, unarguably roblox provides on of the best connections from devs to audiences. But a ratio of 0.0035 use per robux is crazy, especially considering that this 0.0035 was raised from 0.0025 was around half a decade ago. Since then, Roblox has gone public, has had tremendous growth through quarantine, and has become a multi-billion dollar company.

So Roblox, I’m not mad at you, but a response to this would be nice.

It seems as if this issue is purposefully being ignored by Roblox and it’s not even a shock to me if it is being ignored.

EDIT: Indeed, as mentioned in the above bold: Roblox has proven to us they’d love to ignore this issue.

EDIT 7/1: I’m assuming roblox is being quite unjust as usual - reading from the bottom up. I’m hoping that’s the reasoning for why this important issue isn’'t addressed. Otherwise it’d mean they just don’t care about this, not surprising at all.
-coolguyweir

[Brian1KB]

Hey,

Appreciate y’all taking the time to do this. My perspective on the key issue with Roblox for developers right now is the lack of transparency surrounding the algorithm, and what is required to grow your game. Today, with the analytics currently available to us, two games can have matching analytics but entirely different numbers of new visitors provided by the algorithm. Additionally, sweeping algorithm changes are made without announcement, which can lead to huge, unpredictable shifts in revenue for developers on the platform. Platforms like YouTube have a clearer correlation between their available analytics, and algorithmic success. This leads to my question:

What is Roblox doing to help creators focus on the correct aspects of their game (e.g. monetisation, session length, etc.) in order to drive algorithmic growth?

[TheKingsHappyFool (Dan)]

With a goal of empowering creators to build rich, lifelike worlds, our immediate focus with lighting is to improve Future Lighting’s performance so that more users have access to it. Afterwards, we’re focusing on unifying our lighting models so that they look better, more consistent, and scale more smoothly across devices.

Then, we’ll work on bringing state of the art lighting technology – like volumetric lighting and global illumination – to Roblox in a way that all users benefit, not just people with high-end devices.

[orangewarrior78]

Hello Dan and Manuel!

I’m definitely grateful that you’ve given us this opportunity to answer some questions and hope that we’ll see at least a few more of these sessions going forward.

So first question, are there any plans to improve the R6 style going forward? Because there’s defiantly been a lack of support for it in terms of newer features on the platform like scaling or layered clothing.

I’ve heard of some rumors that the old version might be scrapped in favor of a newer one with updated code that would allow more possibilities.

It would be amazing if we all had the ability to make avatars like the one below in the future with the help of UGC, so I do think the potential of the R6 style could be improved on.

Second question, will we see player-made events that have the ability to hand out actual UGC items?

There’s been almost nothing from the events category so far and we haven’t really seen anything live up to the much older events like the Winter Games 2014, Egg Hunts or the Siege of Quebec.

Because while we do have the ability to make special event-like games, I personally haven’t heard much about how we can grant players the ability to earn UGC accessories from badges alone.

It would be great if we had more events that somewhat match the quality the originals, so seeing more of these would be amazing.

Third question, could we maybe see more starter places like the Modern City in the future?

These places alone have really helped me with my projects so far and they were very visually pleasing from just a simple glance alone.

The open-source assets in them have also been very useful, so I’m wondering if we’ll see much more of these in the future since they really do help developers with limited experience and budget.

That’s basically all the questions I have, so I’m hoping to at least see one question answered for the time being.

Thanks again for letting us do this!

-Orange

[BackspaceRGB]

Hello Dan and Manuel! This is a really cool idea by the way, would love to see more AMAs like this one in the future.

I’ll keep it simple. Is R6 still planned to be deprecated/removed? Many games including my own are pretty much impossible to migrate to R15, in my case because of limb sizes, offsets, etc. My game has morphs, which follow the R6 body type, so it would be really difficult to make it work for R15 seamlessly.

[BuildIntoGames (Preston)]

Appreciate the communication and opportunity.

I run BIG Games. We have several popular games that have their own respective teams & developers. One of the biggest pain points has been paying out these developers percentages of revenue on a per game basis. Currently, we cannot automate this and there’s concern that there is no accurate way to do this at all. When can we have the ability to send out recurring group payouts per game instead of the entire group?

Also, any plans to raise the Highlight limit? haha

[OneEDM (EDM)]

Why does Roblox ignore extremely essential years-old bug reports and feature requests? (I would list some but there is simply too many to name)

Additionally, serious issues get completely ignored such as the large issues with VC moderation: Voice chat moderation : Moderation reason needs to be given when banned from voice chat

It is seriously impossible to get Roblox to even acknowledge large issues, let alone actually deal with them. It give off the sense that Roblox just does not care and are only there for the money.

[ramdoys (Ram)]

Hey Dan and Manuel,

I’m curious about what could be the future of UI Design using the Roblox Engine. I feel that we don’t have much options, especially for UI built directly on Studio to really be created into something we want, apart from the cool things we can use (like UIGradients and Strokes which are both amazing in their own regard.) Do you think UI will be more customizable at some point?

Second, do you think support of third-party code editors could become easier to connect and optimal. The current Roblox script editor is great, and the recent updates such as multi-cursor have been phenomenal, but what do you think we can do for developers who prefer to use other code editors where they feel they’re workflow can be improved.

Thanks, Ramdoys.

[Guestdere]

Hi Manuel and Dan,

First of all, Thank you for taking the time to do this AMA, and I hope to see many more in the future!

As Roblox continues to invest in AI in the coming years, how can artists on the platform be sure our creations won’t be used in training these tools without our permission and compensation?

and if, in the future, you allow users to create their own trained datasets for various Roblox AI systems, how do you intend to regulate the same issue as above? For example, even if I say no to having my content used in AI, if another user were to steal it and then allow it to be used, what would happen?

Thank you

[MrChickenRocket]

Hello again!
What are your thoughts on things like toon shading?

[TheArayeus (Arayeus)]

With the advertising changes to under 13 accounts, are there any plans in the works that will help developers reach that target audience of under 13? Right now the only way under 13 will realistically see new games is on the front page.

[LowPolys]

Hey Dan and Manuel,

Will groups ever receive a long overdue update? Being unable to break down revenue by game, or even viewing all-time historical stats is impossible, we’re still limited to the past year. I could figure it out with a bit of manual effort, but it seems like data that Roblox definitely has and I don’t see why it can’t be provided. The exile user feature is also pretty useless as they can just rejoin, making the group wall very cluttered. Both of these have been developer complaints for a long while.

It seems Roblox gave up on groups when they bought Guilded, which is really unfortunate. There was some discussion years back about updates, but nothing seems to have come of them.

[dvdko (dvd)]

@Rainbo1239

Similarly, will the price floors/ceilings be adjusted at all?

I’d like to extend on this post, specifically regarding price floors/ceilings adjustments, to include information that was provided in the guidelines about UGC avatar bodies:

UGC Avatar Bodies [Guidelines]

Hello Creators, As we mentioned in last week’s Creator Roadmap post, we are building features to enable a community-led Marketplace where any creator can make an avatar that is more expressive, communicative, and personalized. Therefore, we wanted to take this opportunity to share more about our work here. In the coming months, we will be enabling members of the UGC Program to create and sell avatar bodies and, soon after, standalone heads. There are a few bodies already on the Marketplace tha…

It is mentioned in the guidelines that upon launch that UGC bodies will have a “minimum price of 0 and a maximum price of 10,000 Robux.”

Will there be any changes to this price floor of 0 robux when avatar bodies and animated faces launch in Mid 2023 or when UGC becomes public? Avatar bodies and animated faces are extremely tedious and complicated to create compared to normal accessories and layered clothing, so a price floor of 0 robux is extremely demotivating for those of us that want to make them. People would be able to undercut prices or release something similar for free which is already happening in the current market with face accessories.

[Salemwarde123OMG (SWarde11)]

Assalamu alaikum @TheKingsHappyFool and @Aelarix, i have one suggestion

Can you guys please add C++ integration for Studio? (For expert devs to code more complex games)

[Rexuret (Kodji)]

@LowPolys

Hey Dan and Manuel

and what do you want to add this year 2023 to Roblox Studio and what updates will there be?

[TheKingsHappyFool (Dan)]

So really two questions here and I’ll take each in turn.
First, how are we looking at anti-cheat beyond Hyperion? It’s an area of heavy investment for us (we heard you at RDC last year)! We’re approaching this through client-side security like Hyperion, server-side systems (as you mention), and APIs for you to provide custom anti-cheat systems for your experiences. We have more client-side solutions we’re actively working on and will be releasing soon. We’re working on server-authoritative physics, which will take longer. We released the Verified API in beta recently to help you provide more custom solutions for your experience.

Second, how are we handling alt accounts to make sure cheaters don’t just switch accounts and continue cheating? In the past year, our ability to detect alt accounts has gotten significantly better, and we’ve seen the impact of that as we look to ensure a safe and civil platform. We see opportunities to make another set of impactful improvements in detection in the coming year. We expect — over the next year — consequences of violations will flow across alt accounts of the same user more often. What we’re looking at now is how we give creators the right level of access to this information without at the same time making it too easy to circumvent our detection mechanisms.

[Dekkonot]

Howdy!

I’m the current maintainer of the backend parsing libraries used by Rojo. It’s involved a lot of work on our end to reverse engineer Roblox’s file formats and I was wondering if going forward we can expect more support on that front.

One of the main issues has been that historically, Roblox operates as if they are the only consumers of files. This has caused us a lot of stress over the years because it means we have to quickly react to unexpected and breaking changes in the file formats that directly impede the ability of our users (which include the teams behind Adopt Me! and Jailbreak). This has happened before but happened recently with the new font system and model scaling. Had it not been for an engineer touching base with us outside of his work, we would have had no warning and models would have broken for all of our users. Fonts did break.

While I know Roblox’s policy has been to develop things in house to make things easier for their users, that solution is a ways off still. I’d like to know if Roblox would be open to engaging with a more friendly dialog with Rojo and it’s maintainers than it has historically (I’m more than open to discussing this in DMs if you don’t feel comfortable commenting publicly, as I know there are some complex feelings towards Rojo at Roblox).

If that’s not possible, what does the future of Roblox’s own tooling look like and can we expect compatibility with Rojo at least?

[dzgak102505DIO (1xh5a6sh4awe6hy5a1h5)]

Hello Manuel & Dan! Since the announcement that Roblox will halt publishing Roblox-made items as limiteds, this sparks a concern for older items that are highly saught-after like for example the “Workclock Headphones” and “Workclock Shades” being part of the Clockwork series, and other items from past sales like the “Bigger Head” and many others possibly never coming back. I believe that these could either be brought back as regular items or limiteds as they don’t really pose a real threat to UGC limiteds.

[Reditect]

Q1: Are there going to be more AMAs? What’s the future of communication between Roblox and its developers?

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Q2: Why is fixing the forums not top priority?

Developers face issues with having the Member Trust Level, and not the Regular Trust Level. Feature Requests and Bug Reports. You can’t hear the community if most of them can’t reach you effectively.

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I have far more questions, as I imagine many others do too, but I feel there’s not enough time for that.

[CatalogEnthusiastic]

Really wish roblox would respond on this one , people have been asking for weeks.
it feels a little lazy that roblox turned blue clockworks limited but not the red and white ones ?
If roblox thinks there is “Competition” they should bring them back onsale in little promotional deals or something instead.

Wish roblox would listen to the negative feedback and respond to everyone who is asking.