Creator Roadmap - AMA with Nick and Tian [Oct 4, 2023]

[Reditect]

@lowercasecreator

there will be a post on discovery soon that should give more detail on how the algorithm works.

Respectfully, we don’t need or want a post talking about the algorithm. There are many sources like this by Roblox already. (Documentation, the forum, and RDCs.)

Edit: To reinforce my point, I have created the following resource: My Current Research on the Roblox Algorithm

We need responses to what’s been said by the community. We want to see what we are saying is not just heard, but actually listened to. (That means responded to effectively.)

---

Larger point, but also an aside.

There is a lack of communication from a variety of teams and individuals at Roblox. Maybe that’s the goal or idea, I don’t work at Roblox, but I’ve been studying the company structure and whatnot for a while. I’d like to see more of a democracy, one where the community has more of a say in where this platform is going.

Roblox would benefit, in my mind, expanding Developer Relations and/or the Creator team. The idea here is to include representatives, those who advocate for the community, on every other team at Roblox. Maybe that’s too much, but we need something.

Another idea would be to have monthly meetings or AMAs or something that resembles the investor meetings. Of course, we have RDC, but I mean something more casual and online. I’m not sure what specifics should be in place, and I wouldn’t want to make anyone’s job harder, but what we have right now isn’t working from what I’m seeing. I’d love to do that btw, advocate for the community inside the company of Roblox.

None of that all matters though if not all teams at Roblox listen to the community. (again, that means responding to us.) If there’s no response, if there is nothing publicly available to see, then who’s to say someone even saw it?

[skywise84 (NickT)]

We don’t have any current plans, but are considering what we could do.

We are increasing visibility creators have of their experiences in production through Creator Analytics, and client-side memory usage is a good one for us to consider. The Microprofiler in engine should be helpful for more detail of memory consumption, and we are interested in doing more. Please let us know what sort of tools you would most like to see.

[skywise84 (NickT)]

We’re aiming to have a beta out before EOY and can’t wait for you to try it.

[MightyDantheman (Fate)]

Before this thread gets locked, here’s a summary of the thread:

Summary of the Creator Roadmap AMA (Oct 4, 2023)

At the time of posting this, I’m still editing in more replies.

[DVDsarestillcool]

Hey All, thanks for the great questions. We’re locking down the post to new questions now but will be working through and replying to more of the existing questions.

[lowercasecreator]

our goal is to enable developers to use whatever tools and workflows make them effective. we intend to provide an immensely powerful and innovative toolset in our Studio, but are also opening up our platform to make integrations with 3rd party tools easier.

[skywise84 (NickT)]

Could you let us know what capabilities you’d like/what you’re struggling to achieve now? We’re not actively working on it but happy to listen to requests and reassess.

[mikebramble202 (Neko)]

there is only speculation about when audios can be made public that being 2024 could we have an official date? its been 2 years of silence and only hints of a potential date. any information on the topic would be greatly appreciated

[skywise84 (NickT)]

We think our upcoming flex layouts feature, which provides responsive UI layouts across devices, will help a lot with this. After you’ve had a chance to try it, please let us know if it’s not meeting your needs.

[skywise84 (NickT)]

Our long-term goal is to have excellent automatic tuning and optimization of features that adapt to the unique capabilities of the end user’s device, so we have no plans to extend the graphics settings for the client.

[skywise84 (NickT)]

Yes!

Most of our effort to date has been focused on shipping the Universal App on all existing Roblox platforms (and a few new ones). With the release of the universal app for Playstation and Xbox on 10/10, we will finally have all Roblox clients leveraging a single Luau codebase to power the app experience. The massive technology forklift is done!

The interesting thing about technology forklifts is that you generally spend a ton of resources changing stuff under the hood, but with the intent that the user experience doesn’t change. Now that we have an aligned codebase across all of our supported platforms, we expect the pace of user-facing changes to accelerate dramatically. We already plan to ship a bunch of improvements to the homepage, search, social features, and the in-experience controls and UI.

[skywise84 (NickT)]

At RDC, we shared how we’re working on style sheets, to allow you to change the look and feel of your UI–and 3D elements–with one click, along with flex layouts, to allow for responsive design. If you could wave a magic wand, what one improvement would you like most?

[lowercasecreator]

great question; we are aware of this gap and, as announced at RDC, in Q4 we will be launching the ability for creators to track sales and revenue for each avatar item.

[lowercasecreator]

yes. long-term we intend to expose all available AIs through Open Cloud, similar to other Roblox services. right now we’re focused on ensuring the quality is high and we are working to reduce costs so that the feature will be appealing to the largest set of users.

[skywise84 (NickT)]

Our approach here is to provide the API surface through Open Cloud that enables content import from all sources - we are working on this now! We may choose to implement sample integrations like the currently released Blender plugin but our hope is that the API is clean and easy enough to access that the community can build any solution they need.

[skywise84 (NickT)]

Currently, Roblox will automatically gracefully degrade lighting when running on a weaker device. In 2024, you can expect us to also enhance lighting on stronger devices.

[skywise84 (NickT)]

We have this on our roadmap but at a lower priority as it hasn’t been a common request. It’s great to see it brought up here, and we’re always happy to reconsider priority if we see more requests from our creators.

[skywise84 (NickT)]

This is a great question. One of the things we’d really like to do is to work more effectively with the thriving open source communities that exist around development on Roblox. They inspire us, and they are a key part of developer productivity on the platform.

Tools like Rojo enable workflows which we would like to better support at the platform level as well. We try to think through the impact of releases on developer workflows and provide lots of heads up if relevant changes are being made, as we recently did with some new Script APIs. We’re always up for feedback on what more we could do. Let us know!

With regards to your question on release schedules. We’re always working to be transparent with our creators, and you can expect our creator roadmap to become richer and more comprehensive over time.

[lowercasecreator]

hey, thanks for the great question and feedback. we’re very invested in improving translations in general. we have plans in early 2024 to provide text filter feedback by giving translators access to a tool where they can test their translations before publishing.

we also have a lot of other improvements coming to the portal based on community feedback (e.g. keyboard shortcuts, CSV upload/download from web, analytics improvements, removing experiences), as well as releasing automated workflows (e.g. continuous machine translation model improvements, enabling players to give you feedback on translations, and many more).