There HAS to be a way to shut down a team create server. This is absolutely necessary.
The last time this came up, it was because someone tried to fix Shut Down All shutting down TC servers. It was explained that there absolutely must be a way to do this, and the change was reverted. Now the exact same change has happened again. And it must be reverted, again, because there is still no alternative way to shut down a team create server.
It is necessary to shut down a TC server for several reasons.
You are logged in at home, but you need to log in remotely. You can’t join so you need to kick yourself. You have to shut down the server to do that
The server is in a broken state that prevents one or more team members from joining. This happens frequently.
The server is in a broken state where it thinks you’re logged in but you aren’t. This happens frequently.
Someone needs to be kicked from the server to clear their script locks or whatever.
Literally any reason a developer might have. A developer should not have to go digging for reasons to perform basic maintenance tasks on a development server such as shutting it down. There are lots of basic features missing from the maintenance side of team create, but shutting down a TC server is absolutely necessary, because it makes up for a lot of missing functionality.
Shut Down All shutting down TC servers really isn’t even bad behavior. No one uses TC on their main place. It’s always used in a testing place. Therefore, a developer doesn’t actually care if the servers are shutting down or not, with very few exceptions. Meanwhile everyone who uses TC is being inconvenienced, or even blocked out of their server, by this missing functionality.
Thank you for expressing your concerns. Most of the issues you mentioned have already been fixed:
You are logged in at home, but you need to log in remotely. You can’t join so you need to kick yourself. You have to shut down the server to do that
This is fixed. Joining a team create server will now kick your previous self.
Someone needs to be kicked from the server to clear their script locks or whatever.
This is fixed. If a user goes idle for 5 minutes they will lose their script locks.
If you are still experiencing any of the other issues, please file a bug report so we can fix them. We want team create to be stable and don’t want users to have to shut down the team create server in order to keep developing.
Blocking developers from performing basic maintenance tasks by claiming to be able to respond to problems after they happen is a bad practice that only serves to inconvenience people who use your software enough to run into problems.
Being able to shut down the server is a critical feature because it is a work around for every single possible bug in team create. Developers don’t have to wait for roblox to respond to their problems before they can resume working. And that’s extremely valuable.
100% bug-free team create is a good goal to have, but roblox needs to understand that it can’t actually be achieved. Critical bugs will appear in the future, and they will stop developers from developing. This is unavoidable. What you’re proposing is that everyone who runs into these bugs just stop working, potentially for over a week.
For what? To keep the configuration drop down slim? I just don’t see the point.
I agree with @Sharksie. Just like having the ability to shut down game servers for maintenance reasons, having the ability to shut down team create servers is really needed.
I myself have ran into many situations where I’ve had to ask @Spathi to leave the TC server so I can turn TC off and reboot it. Most of the time, it is due to bugs or team create glitching out.
By the way @Sharksie, a way to work around this at the moment is to ask everyone to leave the TC server, then manually turn team create off then back on again.
Disabling the troubleshooter is not a solution to anything. Team create is far too unstable and prone to breaking for there to be absolutely no recourse for a TC instance that ends up in a bad state. Reporting a bug on the dev forums and waiting for a fix to roll out is not an acceptable solution when your entire team is unable to do anything.
If you’re interested, the only reason my team is able to do anything right now is because I happen to know how to download a place file directly and I know that “Publish To Roblox To” can be used on TC places. Few people know how to do this, and it isn’t a solution to every broken instance.
Team Create breaking isn’t a place-specific problem. It is a team create-specific problem. I run into these problems on all my team create games, constantly. It’s extremely frustrating that roblox isn’t interested in allowing developers to troubleshoot problems with the most volatile and bug-prone feature that studio offers.
Last night the problem was the terrain region thing, where having a terrain region in your game makes team create not allow any joins. This is a critical bug that completely blocks development and it has been known for over a month. This, this, and this are why making bug reports is not an acceptable solution.
Yep – minus TerrainRegion, it seems to be related to backend resources, as when TC issues pop up, so do DataStore problems. AFAIK this has been a reoccurring issue for the past year or longer.
All of those places seem to work correctly, so I have to agree with @EchoReaper.
As for TerrainRegions, we have a change in the next update that should make them no longer cause opening places to fail (large ones will still cause the loading process to take a while, that fix is a much larger change, but is in progress).
They work correctly now. Will they work correctly every time I try to join them within the next week? Probably not. This is why troubleshooting options are necessary. Terrain regions are just one problem. Team create has lots of problems, obscure problems, and new problems may arise every time studio updates. A troubleshooter is necessary for developers to be responsive to critical bugs.
Yes, I agree. Team Create will not be stable for some time, as even if the process to resolve the server issues are started today and are made the #1 priority, it will be some time before they are fixed. I could understand why someone would question why we should provide workarounds instead of fixing the source if:
The workaround caused behavior that impacted legitimate use of other features
The source issue is non-critical and/or easy to resolve
but neither of those are true. Team Create being shut down with all other servers did not negatively impact developers. Eventually we should pursue the ideal, but it was a mistake to remove that functionality now, with the only reason being it sounded like better behavior – not because it would improve the experience for developers. We made a trivial change which has severely negatively impacted developers in a time where it was needed most when it provided no benefit to the platform whatsoever to change the behavior now instead of waiting until the TC issues were resolved.
This is not directed at any one person, as I do not know who played which parts in the decision making process. All I will suggest is that this change be reserved for a more appropriate time rather than when it is most critically needed.
I agree that we need to have our own troubleshooting options.
Roblox’s vision of having everything work perfectly 100% of the time without any developer intervention is a noble goal, but honestly very unrealistic (not just relating to this TC issue, but also some things that were discussed at RDC like cross-platform performance disparities). There will always be unexpected problems that may pop up, and us developers should have ways to deal with these problems ourselves while we wait for an official fix. We should not have to halt our progress for days/weeks/possibly longer and wait for staff to release fixes if there’s an easy way we could temporarily address the problems ourselves.
I hear your pains, let me know how we can specifically help. I am more than willing to add bug reports, feature requests, or have conversations with Staff to help improve Team Create.
There should be a way to force the team create server to shut down from the website. This way developers can work around bugs that put the server in a bad state. Right now if the server enters a bad state you simply can’t develop your game unless you can figure out a way to fix the bad state.
Team create has several existing bugs that can cause this, and there will be more in the future. Team Create is particuarly prone to these bugs because it’s a singleton server that hosts all the developers in a project, so any kind of bug is a critical problem. Developers can’t be halting their development while they wait for fixes to roll out. As mentioned earlier, one of these bugs has been known and 100% reproducable for months and still isn’t fixed on production.
Thanks! I will provide as much as I can on my end.
Main:
The most critical piece of feedback is that whatever ROBLOX is trying, it’s not working. It doesn’t matter what the intent was – the effect is that the bugs haven’t been resolved and developer experience has worsened because there’s no workaround. ROBLOX is actively pursuing a course of action that has failed to improve developer experience and only worsened it.
There is currently a partial fix for the TerrainRegion bug on the way, but at what cost? Developers have been being locked out of Team Create with the disabled workaround. Fixing the bugs doesn’t require there to be no workaround, so as far as we know, we’ve actively been ruining developer experiences for some trivial design ideal. If the workaround was to be disabled, it should have been done after the bugs were resolved for the most part – it was a mistake to disable it when it was most critically needed. Again, it doesn’t matter what the intent was – the effect has been disaster.
If the workaround was disabled for a reason other than a design ideal, that needs to be communicated to us. The lack of a workaround is severely impacting developer experience, and we need to be able to convince you it’s needed temporarily until issues are largely resolved.
Addendum:
This thread leads me to believe that one of the potential issues is “Users complain that TC is unstable/unreliable, but we don’t get enough bug reports to fix these issues. Maybe if we disable workarounds it will encourage more bug reports”
Response:
As a living devforum encyclopedia, I have read nearly every topic/post on the developer forums – there is not an issue of lack of TC bug reports. Here are the reasons why TC is reputed for instability:
Team Create did not autosave open scripts:
This was an issue upon release. We would work on scripts for hours without closing them, and then we’d disconnect due to our network connection or crash ourselves accidentally in Play Solo. Since the opened scripts weren’t autosaved, we lost hours of work. This really didn’t help Team Create’s first impression. It has since been resolved with the TC script recovery feature.
This was a major issue upon release. I assume the reasoning was something like “Don’t want to publish an unfinished script and break the game”, but once in the hands of users, we ran into issues where our work was mysteriously not saving. Since we didn’t understand why yet, we though TC was unreliable and didn’t save work. Even when we knew the reason, when we forgot to close our scripts and ran into the issue we’d experience an eye-cringe reaction best pictured as:
Team Create “Request publish” did/does not work
When TC was released, requesting to publish the game manually didn’t work. It said “requested server to publish” in the output, and then nothing happened. This was not an issue with us testing before the publishing finished or joining an old server – requesting publish legitimately didn’t work. In my TC game, I resorted to changing the spawn color every time I wanted to publish so I knew if it had updated or not. These three huge data loss bugs in a row for TC established its reputation as unstable.
I do not know if this is resolved. The output message is still the same, and nothing has been done to reassure me that requesting publish works. I still wait a few minutes before testing any changes in online mode because I have no idea if my changes saved or not. I requested that it be changed so it doesn’t ask the server to publish, but it actually publishes and doesn’t return until it’s finished, but nothing ever came of that.
ROBLOX’s backend server issues cripple Team Create
This issue is more recent. We get a wave of TC bug reports about every week because backend services are under stress. This has been going on for months with bug reports not being addressed.
Would adding an option to the website to disable Team Create (or just download a copy of the place file) resolve this issue for you as well? If not, then what is the use case for shutting down the Team Create server manually? I’m not sure how shutting down the server would resolve any issues like the one with Terrain Regions.
