Enabling Players to Join any Place in your Experience

[tareyza]

Hello creators,

Joining an experience has always gone through the root place of that experience. As we continue to evolve our platform, we want to give greater flexibility for creators to enable players to join your experiences in more ways. Today we’re super excited to announce the first product change that will give you that flexibility.

Join any place in your experience

We are adding the ability for creators to allow players to join their experience from any place, not just the root place.

What changes?

When you enable this setting, you will be able to send your users to non-root places when they join. Users can join non-root places directly through joining a friend already on that server, experience invite links, developer prompted invites, or by choosing that server on the server list.

By default, when this setting is not enabled, the player will continue to join only the root place.

What stays the same?

Joins that do not specify a server will continue to join only root places. This includes teleports, pressing the play button for your experience, and joins to any private servers, including reserved servers.

Starting in November, new experiences created will begin to have this setting enabled by default. All existing experiences will have this setting disabled.

How do I turn this on for my experience?

To access this feature, navigate to:

1. https://create.roblox.com/

2. Select an experience

3. In the left navigation bar, click Access Settings under the Access section

4. Under Direct Access to Places, toggle Allow direct joins to any place.

   

How does this benefit me?

Enabling this allows your users to be in the same server with their friends no matter where they are in your experience, allowing them to be with their friends as soon as they join your experience. Enabling this will also let your users have more freedom to pick any server they’d like to join.

More is coming

We are ultimately building this for you to give your players flexibility in how they join your experience and this is just the beginning of our plans. Your feedback and suggestions are welcomed as we start to make this happen. Please leave any feedback you have in the comments.

In particular, if you have any feedback on how future iterations of this feature can better serve your use case, such as more flexibility to enable this for individual places or reserved servers, we would love to hear them.

[DaltonTheDev (Dalton)]

For once I actually think this is a good feature. Looking forward to actually seeing this used.

[TheGuyWithAShortName (Sam Huckaby)]

Would it be possible in the future to add a Game Setting in Security to limit TeleportService to only accept server-side teleports? Often times, sub places hold content that has not yet been unlocked by a player & there’s tons of hoops you have to jump through to verify a teleport wasn’t from an exploiter and the player is actually allowed to be in that place.

[porttoport (port)]

My question and concerns were answered!

I am not going to lie, this sounds like a cool feature, but as someone who doesn’t have a lot of experience with places in experiences, or generally advanced development knowledge, this sounds confusing, to the already confusing place/experience system

I’ve been on this platform for almost 3 years now, and I still don’t know what is the difference or meaning of these two. Why is it so confusing?

I am sure there’s a great developer explanation, but some clearing up would be helpful. And still, with this new change, I don’t understand what and how this impacts my experience. Can users join any servers they want? Isn’t this already a thing? Users can join different versions of an experience? Can they join old versions/places?

I am very confused, and I am sure many others are as well.

Judging by the positive feedback I am seeing, I’d suppose this change is good, so I am glad we now have it

[xonae]

An “experience” is what you’d call a “universe” in the past. It has one root place (being the one you join when you first join a game) and any number of sub-places. These other places would only be able to be joined via TeleportService requests from scripts.

If one of your friends was in one of these sub-places you would not be able to join their server directly, and instead you’d end up in the root place. This setting changes that behaviour to ensure you can always join your friend, no matter what place they’re in within the universe/experience.

[Inconcludable]

Could this be configured to be place-specific? I could imagine it could cause issues if only certain places should be joinable, e.g. if Place1 should be joinable but Place2 shouldn’t, can we disable joining Place2 without having to resort to teleportation or kicking (as the current behavior is now)?

[fkonsk]

Is there a way to selectively toggle this per place inside the experience, rather than as a global toggle? The game I work on has two special places that only work properly when teleported to from terminals in the game (intentional), which ideally wouldn’t be available to join directly using this feature.

Without the ability to toggle per place, this would also allow random users to join our testing server when we’re in there.

[DaltonTheDev (Dalton)]

If this isn’t planned already, this would be a great feature for them to think about adding.

[Dev0mar (Omar)]

Ayy Roblox adding community requested features

One note though, in some workflows, not all places within the experience are meant to be publicly accessible. For example… A developer could have some places strictly for testing purposes.

“Why can’t you just make another experience to hold testing?”
That’s been done! However, testing within the main experience allows access to services/features like datastores, which you don’t have access to if you were to publish it under a completely different experience!

SO, by enabling this feature, can we still restrict access to places we don’t want players to have access to?

[porttoport (port)]

Makes sense now! I can see how this can be a little troublesome though. If this option is enabled (accidentally, or without knowledge) wouldn’t users be able to bypass certain restrictions, and perhaps join places restricted to a group of users? Like levels, stages and private locations.

Thanks for explaining though!

[BanTech]

One example is to imagine a traditional level-based campaign game. You want to design intricate levels but there’s no point having them all in the same place, and you might want to limit things like chat between players on the same level.

In this setup, you might have a root/hub place like a starter place that lets you choose to continue your game or start from a level of your choice. The individual levels are then places within that experience (aka universe, aka game).

Importantly, the purchases/products, datastores, memory store, asset permissions, and various other bits are on the experience, making them all accessible between places whilst being secure from other experiences.

Couple extra use cases documented in the “Places” section on this page: Projects | Documentation - Roblox Creator Hub

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If you want a sequential level-based game, the old setup was perfect, because everyone would join at the hub even if trying to follow their friend, and from there you would use scripting to teleport to the appropriate place. For this setup, I would want the feature disabled.

However, there are other uses to the places feature, such as user-generated rooms in a hotel, or just different areas in a gigantic map (for example a space game with multiple solar systems or galaxies). In these scenarios, it’s been a pain to send users through a root/hub place prior to this feature. For this setup, enabling the feature would be so much better for users.

[kinery]

@TheGuyWithAShortName

Would it be possible in the future to add a Game Setting in Security to limit TeleportService to only accept server-side teleports?

In full support of this! There’s a lot of games that may require a sense of mystery for puzzles, of which those puzzles teleport you to a different Place within an Experience. Unfortunately, exploiters are able to see all the Places within an Experience, so you have to create extra protection to see if the teleport was valid from the server, and not from the client. It’d be great if there were a TeleportService option of which only allows teleports from the server.

[Hydrablox]

Agreed, in the presence of test-places (not meant for players but necessary due to dependency of dataStore for ex.) this feature doesn’t reach its full potential, but a great addition nonetheless.

[Usering]

This is exciting, a few things I definitely want to see:

1. Exposing available sub places on the main place page.
2. Setting a custom description & place name on each sub place page
3. Support for sub-place VIP servers (right now the only solution is building out a custom private server system)

[joesmaller_xyz (joesmaller)]

Will this address the issue when attempting to join another player if they’re in a reserved server of the root place?

Send players to start place if they attempt to follow friend into a reserved server

It’s difficult to provide users with a smooth friend-joining experience when using reserved servers. If a user tries to join a friend’s game they will get this error: [Screenshot_20210905-153143_Roblox] There is no way for the user to know it’s going to fail. They pressed “Join” on the website and expect to join that friend’s server. The behavior I need is for the user to be sent to the game’s start place with player.FollowUserId set. My code can then try to resolve where their friend is via…

[heedicalking]

cool but tell me when server-sided teleports are a thing so I can actually make special event places without exploiters teleporting to them

[CAUTlONED (Cautioned)]

correct, it would allow users to bypass certain restrictions which is why it has the warning text below it so that you cannot accidentally enable it, or at least prepare and make changes to your game to support this feature. If someone does accidentally enable it though, that’s on them, same as any other feature.

[boogameow (booga)]

This is good, but I’d prefer to be able to disable certain methods of joining other places in the experience. For example, I don’t want players to be able to select any place and join, but if players are teleported to a private server on a separate place and then choose to invite a friend I want them to be taken to that other place.

[F_arside (fastb4ck)]

Does this mean you can now join Places via Links? If so, how is this done? Can you provide a URL Example of this?