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.
Broken state already. Since I can’t shut down, I can’t edit this script now. I’m entirely blocked from developing.
Thank you for reporting this issue, we are investigating.
I actually cannot develop my game right now.
Not being able to troubleshoot critical bugs is stupid. This is wasting my time.
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.
What is the place you are having issues with?
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:
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.
Hey Everyone,
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.
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.
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”
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:
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.
Bug Reports/Feature Requests:
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:
https://gfycat.com/ColorfulPlushGarpike
which didn’t help improve our opinion of TC. This has since been resolved.
Bug Reports/Feature Requests:
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.
Bug Reports/Feature Requests:
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.
The issue is that the team create server enters a bad state for any number of reasons and it needs to be recovered. Downloading the place file does not fix this.
I guess turning off TC from the website would work… You could turn it off and turn it back on to accomplish restarting it, I suppose.
First of all on that “feature” with TC server shutdown. It wasn’t a workaround. It was a bug that caused people to loose their work every time they were publishing their games. So we fixed that bug.
We never had an intention to shut down TC servers. However, we see enough evidence that this feature is needed (at least now). Would turning off team create from the web solve the issue?
Yep, as I was asking about, it seems like there was another reason other than what was originally posted. I completely agree that this is terrible, and have no complaints about this behavior being patched now knowing this. Regrettably, both staff -> user and user -> staff feedback were received sourly because we weren’t on the same page, so I’m glad the full reason for patching TC shutdowns has been communicated.
The primary issues I’ve encountered with TC are related to temporarily (for hours) not being able to connect or having trouble keeping connection. They are currently not resolvable as I have to not have these problems in order to stop them. Being able to shut off TC from the website would allow me to work around these issues until they temporarily stop or are more permanently resolved.
Sharksie seems to encounter different issues with TC (scripts being locked?), but as he mentioned, shutting off TC from the web and turning it back on would be the equivalent of restarting the TC server, so I don’t see any problems with this.