Recently a game that I play a lot, Naval 1918, has been broken by Roblox’s update to the camera scripts.
This game being broken may be a symptom of a larger issue where developers don’t know what the best practice is concerning non-standard games or behaviors. Setting AutoLoadCharacter to false in Players will not create a PlayerGui which is pretty unintuitive, so as you said in another post, you have to create the PlayerGui manually and copy everything from StarterGui over. This is unintuitive given Roblox’s propensity to create “plug-and-play” features; you turn the feature on and it works. In contrast, AutoLoadCharacter requires additional scripting to work as expected.
From day one of the endorsed model program, people asked if scripts would be added, and even though the endorsed model program seems to have closed its doors, there is still value in a script library for exactly this reason: Roblox is quirky about some things and there isn’t a quick and easy way to find knowledge and code about how to do this. Or maybe the Roblox Wiki does have this knowledge and it’s just very difficult to find what you are looking for. At any rate, a consolidated library of useful scripts would be a boon to mid- or high-level developers.
It was either Sorcus or Stravant or some other Person Of High Stature who commented that Roblox developers tend to reinvent the wheel way too often instead of building off existing work. This is one avenue to correct that.
I agree that confusing behavior is an issue; however as I see it, what you suggested wouldn’t be a good solution.
The endorsed model program is no longer running, so there’s a dependency on that must be filled before Roblox can even begin working on your issue. If it ever comes back, maybe it could use this solution, and it would be great because I would really like to see lots of good quality scripts showing up in the toolbox.
Since that’s not a realistic thing at this point, as an alternative solution, there are two things:
The behavior of things like CharacterAutoLoads could be cleaned up lots
The Roblox wiki team could work at a faster pace to release quality content to teach new developers how to use specific things like CharacterAutoLoads
Both are already things us developers seem to generally expect from Roblox. It wouldn’t be much of a change on them or us to push it forward, I think.
I’m not talking about reinstating the endorsed model program, and the toolbox isn’t really suited to this application anyway.
This issue extends to more than just CharacterAutoLoads. There are many quirky or unexpected parts of the Roblox engine. Making characters CanCollide false comes to mind.
It’s not really our fault for reinventing the wheel either. It happens so many times that respecting Roblox’s decisions leave us with changed behaviours that happen completely out of our control. This couldn’t even have been prevented by using Roblox’s features. On the contrary, the games who overwrote CameraScript do not suffer from this update.
This literally proves further that reinventing the wheels that Roblox made actually has more benefits than harms.
