As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to identify when changes to built-in plugin widgets occur. This results in difficult to debug problems, unexplained behavior changes, and overall just confusion; a frequent conversation topic among me and my coworkers is “did it always work like this or did it change?”
The Next Gen Explorer Beta has had a revolutionary idea: it includes a version identifier for the widget. I can tell easily that at the time of writing the explorer is version 0.9:
This is a good thing! It means that I can, as an example, include that version in bug reports, and if the version changes I know for sure that the widget has changed. This will be more important as time goes on because there is evidently work being done to update built-in plugins separately from Studio, and it’d be cool if things did not suddenly change without any indication.
I would like future built-in widgets to identify a version in some way like this. It doesn’t have to be in the title (and in fact probably shouldn’t be because that’s clunky), but it would be a huge boost to my ability to debug issues and report problems.
If Roblox were to address this problem, it would help me and others report bugs more accurately and increase my peace of mind because I would actually know if something has changed or not.
I’d also love this, but please embed it info a “information” or log file, since it wouldn’t look too nice to have more clutter for the panels. Take for example the properties panel with a long named-instance.
I was imagining something more along the lines of small text in the corner of the widget, so that I don’t have to go digging, but that would probably work. Though I’ve just checked and copying text from “About Studio” is a bit annoying (you can’t use Ctrl+C, you have to right click and select Copy), so that might need to be improved.
Here’s a bad mockup of what I mean. Obviously it could be smaller or a different color.
Well, also consider that a lot of Luau code (especially in the future) is not going to be associated with a specific widget. Think things like the light guides when you select a light. Those are things we might deploy, but that don’t have anything to tap into. May sound trivial now, but there’s definitely going to be non-trivial tooling that is purely in viewport.
Yeah in that case it’d probably be good to have the version somewhere other than the widget. I’m still a sucker for a visual though… Would help with people attaching screenshots of the widgets too if they were visible but unobtrusive.
Glad that it’s fixable! Want me to make a separate feature request?
Also FWIW, we’re dramatically improving the rate at which these get updated. Currently there’s a lot of nuance with when you restart Studio, if you have any Studio windows open, etc etc that we hope to eliminate.
