Improved Save Experience in Studio!

[desserts_yumyum]

Hello developers,

We have made several improvements to the Save to Roblox experience in Studio while ensuring Save to File workflows remain intact. Our goal is to streamline the Save to Roblox experience so you can easily access your games from anywhere, collaborate with others, and access cloud features during development. The features below enable you to iterate more quickly on your work and give you greater control over when to share your experiences with others.

[Beta feature] Ctrl+S (Cmd+S in Mac) saves place to the location you last saved to

You can now enable Ctrl+S (Command+S in Mac) to save your place to a local file or to Roblox Cloud depending on the current context you are editing:

• If you edit a place that was last saved to Roblox Cloud, then Ctrl+S saves back to Roblox.
• If you edit a place that was last saved to your local file system, then Ctrl+S saves back to the same file.
• If you edit a new place that hasn’t been saved yet, then Ctrl+S prompts you to Save to Roblox for the first time.
• Save As switches your current context in Studio. For example, if you save Place A to file as Place B, your current context in Studio switches to Place B. Ctrl+S afterward will save back to the file location for Place B. There’s one exception: if you are in a Team Create session, Studio doesn’t change your editing context even if you do Save As. Pressing Ctrl+S will save to the active Team Create session.

The previous Ctrl+S shortcut always saved your place to a local file, and it didn’t do anything if you were using Team Create. There was no default shortcut for Save to Roblox. The new general Save shortcut helps you iterate on your places faster because Studio now knows the saved location of what you are actively editing in Studio.

You can still save a new place to a local file by clicking File > Save to File. If you save a place to a local file then press Ctrl+S, then the place saves back to the same file.

To enable this Beta feature, go to File > Beta Features, and activate "Save shortcut is contextual.” Then click Save and restart Studio.

NOTE: To minimize disruptions in your workflow, the new Ctrl+S behavior doesn’t change the Save behavior if you customized any keyboard shortcuts in Studio. If you customized your keyboard shortcuts but still want to use the new Ctrl+S behavior, go to File > Advanced > Customize Shortcuts and set the “Save” action to Ctrl+S.

Save to Roblox without Publishing

Saving a Place to Roblox for the first time no longer adds a Published Version to its Place Version History. This fix clearly separates the Save and Publish functionalities: Save to Roblox saves your work-in-progress place to Roblox and Publish to Roblox shares your place with others on the Roblox platform. Cloud features such as Asset Manager, Game Settings, and Team Create that were previously gated on Publish can now be used once you save a place to Roblox.

NOTE: There is one minor known bug where File > Save to Roblox is grayed out in the File menu UI when you create a new place. A fix will be released soon. Meanwhile, you can use File > Save to Roblox As from the menu to save to Roblox for the first time, or if you have the above Beta feature on, you can just press Ctrl+S.

Additionally, we are working on improving save messages so that you always know where you’re saving to and whether the save was successful. Please keep an eye out for further announcements on save experience improvements. Many thanks to @Brouhahaha, GeneralTso58, @tamtamchu, and @SwirlTheNumbers for making this feature possible.

We appreciate your feedback! Please let us know what you think in the comments below.

[local_ip (jmk)]

This is a nice change! Could the message shown on the website for PlaceHasNoPublishedVersion be changed? Right now, it’s:

This experience is unavailable because its starting place is unpublished. Publish the starting place to make it available.

My main issue with it is that it is shown to every user and not just the developer - what is a user on the game’s page supposed to do with this information?

[BlockyHead2006 (BlockyHead)]

Thank you! This is so helpful! It’s so much quicker to save to Roblox now! Thanks @Brouhahaha, @tamtamchu, and @SwirlTheNumbers!

[RobertJr_YT (RobertJr)]

All this time I assumed it saved directly to Roblox… Glad this improvement was made!

[TheBatman1907]

This is very helpful thank you!
I haven’t tested it yet but just in case the save shortcut is currently usable during test runs, it might want to be disabled during them, in case someone uses it as a key bind for an in-game function.

[sanjay2003 (Sanjay)]

This is cool and all but, it would be great if there were less barriers on saves. I feel that I shouldn’t have to immediately publish somewhere to be able to save. Periodically, there should be saves that I can look back to that are stored on my local machine.

There have been far too many times where Roblox has said that it has saved, I’ve closed out and opened the session on a different day where this the state of the place hasn’t updated to match the save.

The one thing that absolutely annoys new developers on this platform and stops them from completion is the lack of saves be reliable or persistent. You shouldn’t count on people always saving. Internet could go out. Bugs could be present. Whatever it may be, a local archive with saves that are named can go a long way to assuring users that they have not lost their work.

Love the update. Still more work to do.

[d_ytme (Sammy)]

This might sound specific, but could we get a confirmation window for the publishing button? It’s super close to the save one, and we might mistakenly click Publish instead of Save when working on a big update for our games and accidentally make public a half working version, while also spoiling parts of the update we might have liked to keep a secret.

[ittrgrey (Ittr)]

@desserts_yumyum

If you edit a new place that hasn’t been saved yet, then Ctrl+S prompts you to Save to Roblox for the first time.

We should be able to switch this to being to a local file. Please don’t assume we always want everything in the cloud: October 29th-31st should show why that is not always viable.

[12mrcool (NorthernCanuck)]

So we still will be able to save to a local, publish and alternate between them. I personally hardly ever save to roblox, only when u want to share a creation or something, and always save to local, and if I want to use a different computer, that’s what my stuff also on a back up external hard drive is for.

[eric12095]

we still main supporting for quicker to saved directly for roblox this improvement anyone might saving experience and keep was made it direction

[ThatTimothy]

Great update! Much better than the previous one, which just overrode the ctrl + s to always save to Roblox. I’m always happy to see feedback being taken into consideration, especially when it works out so well. This was quite simply the perfect way to make saving work for any workflow. Keep up the great work!

[TayIorRobinson (tay)]

Asking for the ability to change the default to save to file. I really only like saving to Roblox when I have the intension of sharing at some point. In the other cases, I’d rather not clog up the list on the website/studio and just have a folder of me experimenting things, with proper folder organisation. (and if i want to work on another device, i just let iCloud handle it /shrug)

[Boele009]

Without the Roblox servers you couldn’t even open studio, and neither will you when Roblox is offline. Roblox Studio requires you to be online and connected to their servers.
I do agree that local saving should be possible, but it wouldn’t have helped you during Roblox’ outage

[VGVC2]

I see this being an annoyance but an easy workaround that I always used before this system even went into place was pressing ctrl+shift+s, something I usually do out of habit

[Dionysusnu]

@desserts_yumyum

Saving a Place to Roblox for the first time no longer adds a Published Version to its Place Version History.

Just to be clear, this is only for the first time, right?
I want to make sure I can still revert a place to a saved but not published version using the “version history” feature.

[Radmilo_Carevic]

Seems interesting. I think this is what I need for Team Create.

[BuilderBob25620 (BuilderBob)]

@sanjay2003

I feel that I shouldn’t have to immediately publish somewhere to be able to save.

You don’t have to publish the game to be able to save it. You can just do File > Save To Roblox instead of File > Publish to Roblox.

Also, if you go to the place on the Roblox Website, click on the three dots, click on “Configure this Place”, and then click the “Version History” tab you will see a list of all the updated place instances. There will also be a column called “Published” for each save that will either have a check or not. If it has a check, then that means it’s was published to be a live update when playing in-experience. If it doesn’t have a check then that just means it was saved instead of published. You can also click “Revert to this version” next to the saved place instance. That will revert your the place in studio to the desired historical save. If you want to actually revert the playable game (in-experience) to a previous save you have to revert to the desired save, go into that place in studio, and then publish it.

@sanjay2003

Periodically, there should be saves that I can look back to that are stored on my local machine
…
a local archive with saves that are named can go a long way to assuring users that they have not lost their work.

This is already a feature and has been for quite a while. You can enable it in-studio by going to File > Studio Settings > Studio > Auto-Recovery > Auto-Recovery Enabled and switching it to enabled. You will also see a Auto-Recovery Interval setting that sets the interval in-between autosaves (in minutes) and a Auto-Recovery Path setting that defines the path on the local machine to the file that contains the autosaves.

@sanjay2003

Internet could go out

Actually this isn’t as much of a problem as you might think as long as the studio window with the place is still open when it does. If this happens then you can just do File > Save to File.

[BuilderBob25620 (BuilderBob)]

This is truly a great update! However, after replying to @sanjay2003, I realized that there is an improvement that could be made to the current autosaving feature. As he mentioned,

@sanjay2003

a local archive with saves that are named can go a long way to assuring users that they have not lost their work.

This made me realize that current autosave files are not named and can be hard to fine if there are multiple for different places. Autosaves are currently just named Place_AutoRecovery_ and then a number by default. It would be easier to differentiate between autosaves for separate places if they were instead named the name of the place saved at the time it was saved along with the autosave version number instead.

[Brouhahaha]

That’s right. The change here is that we don’t insert an initial “published” version the first time you save. That way we guarantee place version history matches what you do. If you choose “publish”, a new published version appears; if you choose “save”, a saved version - whether it’s the first time or later times. You can still revert to prior versions.