Improved Visibility of Collaborators in Studio

[Update] April 11, 2024

Hello creators,

We’re excited to announce a collection of features in Studio that boost collaborator visibility and simplify team interactions! Starting today, creator teams can now easily view and navigate to a collaborator’s context in the workspace as they work together in real-time inside Team Create. We are gradually rolling out the feature over the next two weeks, and all Studio users will see the changes by 4/11.

New UI for collaborator presence in the upper-right corner of Studio

You can now see your collaborators in a Team Create session in the upper right corner of Studio. This new UI will be your control tower for anything related to your collaborators going forward. Look out for new ways of communicating and interacting with your teammates here in the future!

To see the additional status of your collaborators, click on the presence section for the full list:

We’ve also addressed the issue where a collaborator is represented as different colors to different teammates in a Team Create session. Now, If you’re represented by a Green color in the workspace, everyone you’re working with will see you as the Green collaborator!

Haven’t added a collaborator to a project before? You can easily do so by clicking on the Collaborate button in the top-right corner of Studio.

Additional info on collaborator’s status

For each collaborator in the list, you will be able to see two new pieces of information:

  1. Collaborator status - See whether a user is active or inactive inside Studio. Users become inactive if they do not use Studio for more than 5 minutes.
  2. Collaborator location - See a short description of where the user is working: in the 3D workspace or inside specific script files

After viewing this info, you can easily join your collaborator’s location by hovering over the user and pressing Join. This is an existing feature, and you can read more about it here.

Control visibility of collaborators’ selections in the workspace

We heard your feedback that the colored highlights of collaborators’ selections in the workspace can be distracting when you’re trying to focus.

You can now choose whether to see collaborators’ selections in your 3D viewport and inside Live Scripting sessions by toggling the Show collaborator selections setting. Disabling the setting will make all collaborators’ selections invisible to you only.

The setting can be found in the Collaborator list view:

Inactive collaborators’ selections are automatically deselected

We’ve fixed the behavior where the colored highlights for collaborators’ selections remain even after they are no longer active in Studio. Now, if a user is inactive, their selection in the workspace is deselected so that it’s not a fixed visual distraction to others.

What’s Next

We are focused on enabling deeper interactions with your collaborators inside the workspace. Here are some upcoming features on our roadmap:

  1. Activity History in Studio (Mid 2024) - Understand and react to key collaborator activities and configuration changes to the place you’re working on in Studio
  2. Annotation & Comments (Late 2024) - Leave comments inside the 3D viewport, scripts, and more inside Studio! Discuss and resolve questions with your collaborators directly in your workspace.
  3. Deprecating the Team Create widget (Mid 2024) - With this launch, we’ve moved all functionality that was in the Team Create widget to the new Live Collaborator view. To save precious Studio ribbon space, we’ll be deprecating the old Team Create widget (shown below) within the next few months.

We welcome any feedback or questions!

Many thanks to the wonderful team that worked on this feature: @kresselia, @lovedanihonjin, @vreddym, @yohooyohoo, @IgnisRBX, @MoodyMandyMeow, @1987rab, @hughtesting, @rbx_dert

217 Likes

This topic was automatically opened after 9 minutes.

Huge features for collaboration visibility, love this.

I would also love it if I could get the ability to kick a collaborator out of a session so I can publish over the place they’re sitting inactive in. Happens a lot when we have people trying to publish updates to a starter place but people are sitting in it because they use it to get to other subplaces (i.e. they haven’t discovered list view in Studio yet.)

46 Likes

I love this, finally I can see who’s doing what! I’ve had so much moments where my friends looked like they were AFK.

32 Likes

I sense some steps in the right direction, building a discord-rich presence and so far, I’m running into issues with “how to know what the person is doing.”, maybe we get an API, who knows?!

Great work as always, can’t wait for the future! Is it planned to see what script they are editing?
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20 Likes

hey @Bulldo344 the collaborator location text under the username will show you the name of the script they’re editing :slight_smile: try it out and let us know if this is what you needed!

21 Likes

Stumbled upon this today while editing a game - a welcome change indeed! Really nice being able to see who’s in the game with me just by looking up.

18 Likes

This is awesome! I was just thinking earlier this week how great a feature like this would be. I would love the ability to kick inactive collaborators from the server so I can save/publish over the place without having to go out of my way to disable team create, overwrite the place, and then re-enable team create again.

17 Likes

Visual changes are nice but I think the real thing we need is better permissions management. Adding someone to Team Create gives them too many unnecessary permissions and we can’t even restrict simple stuff. Not important for big studios but it is important for small groups.

22 Likes

I was wondering what the user icons in the top right were for. Thanks Roblox, actually good change for once :+1:

17 Likes

Awesome changes! This was a much-needed overhaul and I’m glad you guys got to it - great work!

16 Likes

Great update.

A much needed and long awaited update, hoping it releases soon.

16 Likes

This is a really neat update, however it doesn’t seem to have fixed a pretty frequent bug where a collaborator doesn’t appear in the Team Create widget nor the new Live Collaborators widget including the upper-right corner.

You can see all the changes they make, but not what they’re selecting, their camera indicator in the viewport and they don’t appear in any of the widgets I mentioned.

They do however appear in the Players service.

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19 Likes

Awesome update! Though we’re still waiting for a fix related to collaborators having access to a experience in a group are not able to load animations that created under said group.

18 Likes

This is great and all, however, are there plans to give us the ability to grant a collaborator permission to read/edit scripts? There are scenarios where I commission someone, usually someone I recently met, to code/build something, but I do not want them to READ or EDIT any code in my scripts in my experiences for security reasons (but can still playtest the experience as normal). Will something like this be possible in the future?

18 Likes

Hello, Great Update but i have a question

Why When someone is “Inactive” is no longer visibile in studio (Map)?
I understand that if it is inactive it is not moving however it is always within the map and I would like it to be possible for me to know where it is within the map.

(I Would Suggest to adding a Settings to enable this or disable this)

Also because he is always in the studio (Inside Studio Map)

12 Likes

Are there supposed to be two buttons? both lead to “Manage Collaborators” btw.
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7 Likes

Cool update related to studio.

7 Likes

Hi, the newer “Collaborate” button is supposed to replace the blue button.
Restarting your Studio application should resolve this issue.

9 Likes

Is there a new location to turn off collaboration completely? I used to have occasional data loss with team create enabled that completely stopped when I disabled it, and I’m concerned it’ll be returning if I can’t opt out of the new system too. (Note: This was data loss when developing by myself on experiences nobody else ever touched - just having team create enabled at all occasionally resulted in studio failing to save data even though it said saves were successful)

4 Likes