Creator Roadmap - AMA with Dan and Manuel

[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.

[MrChickenRocket]

https://devforum.roblox.com/t/isverified-beta-launch-announcement/2392199

Ooops this page is private.

[Aelarix (Manuel)]

Long-term, we are building an economy where anyone can create, sell and earn on our platform. As we open up the ability to create to everyone, we want to be thoughtful in our approach.

With the launch of UGC Limiteds, we are improving our automated moderation, including duplicate detection.

We will be opening up creation only to creators that we can verify and are in good standing. With Limited items, we are also learning about the impact that upfront payments have on the legitimacy of the items that people are creating and we will use these learnings when we open UGC creation for all. If you believe that content on the platform infringes on your intellectual property rights, you can report that content to us. Learn more about IP reporting on Roblox here.

With our Marketplace vision and principles in mind, we intentionally leave room for iteration so we can listen to the community’s feedback. Each new feature is a step towards the long-term and we are excited to go on this journey with you.

[MasterPlayerMind (MrSherloque)]

Have you guys been in the works of a standalone roblox vr app?

[ShipooI]

I have some questions that expand on the Community-led Marketplace point in the road map.

With the release of UGC limited and the upcoming ability to sell them through groups, and the eventual public release, are there any plans for more functionality added to the marketplace system surrounding UGC?

Many creators are using free Limiteds to emulate a form of Award API, is this something the team at Roblox is thinking of making easier for both Limiteds and non Limiteds by releasing a proper API for it? This would allow for much more inventive uses of UGC on the platform and could allow for unique opportunities in this future that Roblox is pursuing.

Also, will place ID based sales be coming to regular UGC as well? It would allow a community-led group to easily collaborate and publish assets, as well as direct sales in a way more similar to a real economic system. I know both of these are features many UGC creators and Devs are asking for.

P.s. What is your favourite food? Mine is Salmon Nigiri

[MightyDantheman (Fate)]

Hello Dan and Manuel, I’m very happy to see an AMA like this.

Right off the bat, I’d like to say that there’s much more I’d like to discuss, but I’ll keep it to the main things for now. The rest can be found in this topic: “If you could make any service, what would it be?”

So here are a few things I’d like to see:

• Pixel color at screen point
• Invert/Mirror images/UI elements (via negative size) (Especially ViewportFrame)
• UI render effects (such as blur)
• More visual rendering effects in general (including different types of distortion)
• Improved terrain functionality

One of my biggest question is if we’ll ever see shaders or otherwise have access to some sort of GPU API?

There are many features and mechanics that I’d love to see, but we’re forced to wait for them to be implemented by Roblox rather than being able to do it ourselves.

Another big question is if we’ll ever get more website API access?

The HttpService doesn’t allow requests directly to the Roblox domain. We know that this was to essentially prevent Roblox servers from DDoSing itself. However, with all of the API we already have, such as MarketPlaceService and some others, I feel as though there should be API for all parts of the website by now, with the appropriate rate limiting. Things such as more group information, more experience page information, etc. I don’t think developers should need to use a proxy for this sort of thing, especially when similar partial services already exist and work great.

Lastly, will see see AI integration with Roblox Studio?

We’ve seen some amount of AI for scripting, but obviously, especially with it being new, it leaves much to be desired. I’ve recently started trying out ChatGPT and it has been truly impressive. I’d love to see either a partnership with OpenAI, or an equal level of AI, of which can connect to Studio and use the current explorer as context for things.

Bit of a bonus one and not a question but, I’d love to see the road map show more of what’s being worked on. I know that not everything is shown for various reasons, but I’d love to at least see monthly progress updates on features that have already been anounced.

I have other questions, but I’ll leave it there for now. Thank you for your time.

[MetatableIndex]

Hey, I have two really straight forward questions with probably not so straight forward answers.

1 - What happened to VideoFrames? When can we expect them to become available?
2 - Will we ever see the ability to create subscriptions within our experiences, to complement the Gamepass and Developer Product dynamic?

[OneEDM (EDM)]

@Aelarix

We will be opening up creation only to creators that we can verify and are in good standing.

Could we get elaboration on what this means?
Is this ID verification?
Manual review process?
Other metrics?

[Aelarix (Manuel)]

Our long-term vision is to enable the community to document anything that will be relevant for creators. Our initial focus will be to improve the quality and coverage of Roblox platform documentation and best practices. We will eventually expand to include documentation on community generated libraries and frameworks.

Once open source docs launch, edit links will become available to developers on the docs site. Any edits will result in a Github PR, which will be reviewed and approved by internal tech writers or engineers. This will ensure completeness and accuracy of information we share with our larger creator community.

[Somewhat_Unknown]

My biggest issue with Roblox at the moment (and at every other moment) is that the engine is incredibly limited when compared to game engines from the early 2000s. The Source engine which had its first public release in 2004 has many features that Roblox even now does not support.

Those including decals that wrap around meshes and terrain in the world convincingly, projected textures which have all sorts of uses, displaying a camera’s view on a screen like a security camera, using animated textures and emissive textures, textures of any resolution, particles which collide with the environment, node-based 3D pathfinding etc etc.

Even more advanced features that are already in Roblox like refraction on glass or reflections on terrain water are not exposed to the user. Will we ever get the ability to distort the environment or create our own reflective surfaces like other modern engines out there?

Thank you for your time and thanks for doing one of these! Hope there will be more in the future!

[Aelarix (Manuel)]

We believe Creator Marketplace is core to our developer community. We have an opportunity to accelerate creation, and we believe those who choose to invest their time creating better tooling, plugins, and assets should have great opportunities to develop their businesses. We have started with tactical improvements like helping consumers better find assets through semantic search and rich media.

We are taking a thoughtful approach to the market economics and will have more to share on that this year.

[pxrplewater (YxllowFire)]

Hello again,

I would like to ask some more questions,

1. When will verification thresholds be announced and will there be a application for verification?

2. Will there ever be a method to send Robux as payment for commissions? People usually
   can not send robux through groups, so it would be great to have an alternative to send
   robux fee-free or a lot less fee.

3. Will moderation team increase in size with the announcement of UGC going public?

4. Is there going to be requirements for UGC uploading within the future of public release to be able to put an item out?

5. Will there be a section for Roblox items and UGC items?

6. Is there any planning of making offsale items come back?

Thanks again!

[TheKingsHappyFool (Dan)]

Yes, we’re actively working on unblocking frame rate. Separately, we’re always working to improve our performance! In the past few months, we’ve improved the performance of fundamental Luau operations like table.sort and math.floor/ceil, we improved avatar load times by ~16% (P50), reduced memory usage in part of our physics system by 70%, and more.

[ii_Oranjey (orange)]

Is UGC actually coming to everyone later this year? How will this work? Will you still need to apply?

[benpinpop (Ben)]

Is there a plan for improvement on Roblox’s API documentation (website API, not lua). I understand there is a plan to improve regular documentation, but Roblox’s API is slightly lacking when it comes to design, and list of open endpoints, especially because a lot of developers are lacking endpoints which they can use for utility. I’d have to isolate specific issues, but there are definitely some that just don’t exist that developers really need access to.

Along with that, is Roblox planning on increasing education and documentation for learning? The current roblox tutorials only provide a meager amount of information, and while Roblox has pushed for more presence in the classrooms, there is not enough material to be turned into at a minimum semester-long course. You could get through the education pages within a week or two, and if you stretch it, maybe a month. I’ve tried proposing using roblox luau to teachers, but there is not enough to work with, and that’s a major limitation.

[slitherylemur]

Will roblox consider making a developer support network.
My biggest issue as a roblox developer who has had a couple successful games on this platform is that my entire income always seems to be hanging on a thread.
I could get my account unrightfully banned tomorrow and loose my entire business and my only support line is going through public roblox customer support which for developers is (no offence) useless or I can make a fuss on twitter.
I think there needs to be a dedicated support team for developers that can help with issues on the platform that should be open to anyone with a game making income on the platform.
This would much increase the confidence developers have investing in the platform and in my opinion is necessary at this stage.

P.S. If this feature already exists in a limited capacity for “top developers” I think it really needs to be expanded. Roblox is already my full time income and I plan to make a lot more money for this platform but if upcoming and medium sized developers like me have no support itll be harder to become the top developers of the future.

[TheKingsHappyFool (Dan)]

This was mostly answered in this question, but to restate this year we expect to be able to link alt accounts and will get better at having consequences “flow” across all alts. We’ll start these actions with the most serious violations and gradually ramp it up.