This is the best thing that can balance the toolchain for custom implementation instead of defaults.
Adding onto this. I actually find the default source control features to be incredibly frustrating. Instead of inventing the wheel time and time again, let us use git. The actual one. Not the Roblox mocked version.
I have used Rojo for a while and I haven’t not used it since. I find studio’s issues with the editor, the constant crashing and such to be abysmal. Game development should be fluid with the ability to onboard new people to your project too.
The dude who made Rojo needs a raise. He creates fantastic work.
They even use it for developing core scripts, libraries, etc. Even parts of studio are developed with Rojo lol.
As professional development becomes more accessible, I have seen people even younger grasp the basics of this tooling. If Roblox does implement core support for something like Rojo, it’ll probably only make professional development better taught.
The only downside of this, is that a Roblox-created Rojo, would probably be closed-source, propriotary, and likely not written in the most efficient language.
It was hard for me to learn how to use Rojo and Git for the first time
I prefer using an external editor (VSC) and Git, but I stopped using Rojo, because it’s hard to work with other developers who don’t have previous experience with it (as stated in the OP)
I also use packages for scripts sometimes, and packages don’t work with Rojo as is
Rojo being integrated into studio would solve the current issues above
I’ve been using Rojo since it first came out, and I couldn’t agree more. Studio is a footgun for any professional development. The fact that I’m actively stressed while trying out anything experimental because I know if something goes wrong that I’m not able to revert my files to exactly how they were before, is a huge problem. Drafts help with this but are in no place to act as a replacement for Git, and really should not even try to compete with it. It’s healthy to rely on industry standard tools.
As a Roblox developer, I feel trapped when I’m using Studio. I value the transferability of skills between things I work on. Web dev, command-line interfaces, app development, game dev that’s not Roblox–all of these can be used with essentially the same tools. With Roblox, I’m locked into the Studio ecosystem unless I explicitly break out. It’s suffocating and doesn’t let me develop common skills that transfer to other disciplines in software development, which is why I will always choose to work with real files for every project I have the control to make that decision for.
The push-back against Rojo is unhealthy and ultimately holds the platform back from being used by larger studios. Adopt Me is 31 people strong, that can not happen with vanilla Studio. I want to echo what Quenty said: please, respect the community. Give us the support we’re asking for. Not what you think we need.
A while back I asked people about their favourite text editor, with only 13% (out of 51) at the time of writing this reporting it to be Roblox Studio. Some users on the thread argued strongly in favour of filesync, see for example: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/what-is-your-favourite-text-editor/597255/25. @GGGGG14 also did a poll asking about text editor preferences, and while it doesn’t include Roblox Studio, it highlights the diversity of what users expect from their text editor.
Personally, I find the restrictiveness of the Roblox Studio environment to be the number one issue in my workflow. Innovation is always nice to see, but the scope of what Roblox tries to change needs to be limited. As a developer and user, I want software to enable me, not to restrict me.
Scaling the Adopt Me team to 30 team members would not have been possible without proper code review through GitHub PRs that have enabled us to share knowledge and catch mistakes.
Rojo’s existence is the reason why we’re able to access professional tools like git and vscode, available to the broader software engineering community that are more comprehensive than existing Roblox proprietary equivalents, and thus we are incredibly thankful for all the work that LPG and other open source contributors have put towards building this bridge. But as Quenty and others have pointed out, without Roblox’s official support and endorsement, Rojo will lack access to critical APIs and engineering resources that could greatly improve the quality of life of our team and other professional teams.
I’d love to see industry standard workflows receive official support from Roblox Product & Engineering such as with Collaborative Editing.
I know this is a complex and at times contentious topic for many employees internally within Roblox Corporation. Ultimately, the Adopt Me team isn’t ideological in what solution must be implemented into Studio: It doesn’t have to be Rojo. It can be something else. But it needs to solve the same concerns and grievances that power users and professionals within the community have held for a while.
To Roblox Product: In the spirit of open source, let’s Collaboratively Edit a solution together. The professional community wants to help with ideas and context, just reach out with sustained dialog.
Jailbreak development heavily leverages open-source tools like Rojo. And Rojo alone has completely changed my development experience. To echo the points in this post:
Git allows me to confidently make changes knowing they’re all tracked, work on multiple features at once, and release individual features as they’re ready, rather than when everything works together. Also enables working on long-term projects/refactors.
An (external) text-editor with support and customization to allow programmers to work in the environment (with shortcuts, plugins, and other niche features) that they’re used to, rather than forcing to learn and be slowed down by an sub-par-text-editor. This has single-handedly contributed to a huge, huge increase in productivity.
I am very thankful to the great talent (@LPGhatguy, @Anaminus, et al.) creating these super-tools that empower my workflow 10x.
Another key use case for me is the ability to (aside from other file editors) use external tools that all operate well on files.
For example, I use external tools to render and generate spritesheets and their lookup tables for me, which just dump results in a file, which Rojo happily syncs to Studio. Or to synchronize localization tables into Studio, which I automatically generate externally (merging translations from multiple external sources together, such as from other professional translation services who all operate on files).
Without Rojo this sort of stuff would be a huge pain to sync manually and leads to lots of manual tedious work.
This is the biggest thing. Often times I understand that product/PMs will not take feature requests at face value—as you should often. But this is different.
I’m telling you, please, we know this is what we need for our workflow. Please don’t try to dictate how we use roblox studio to us. Files are not negotiable.
Please respect the community. We know what we want. Let Roblox’s studio be an excellent tool. Empower us to use Studio this way.
Since I’ve started using Rojo in my workflow, collaborating with other developers and working on larger projects became significantly easier. Besides being able to use industry-standard tools, I can also be confident that all chains in my workflow do exactly what they are promising to do. There is no magic cloud that promises to take care of my project and then lets me down once a week, like is the case with Roblox’s set of tools on offer.
File versions that can be stepped through at any point in time, great tools to merge code and full manual control over the files that my team is working with are some of the things that I rely on and that Rojo empowers me to use, which are all critical for me to work on games profesionally. I’ve found a lot of the cloud-based tools that Roblox has introduced in the past couple of years to be cumbersome to use, clashing with my workflow and the workflow of profesional tools and engines, and unreliable.
It feels like my workflow is actively hindered by Roblox and the direction that Roblox Studio developments are following. As long as the development environment Roblox offers to developers does not match that of tools developed by many open-source developers, this policy mocks the many profesional developers on the platform and doesn’t give me the feeling that I’m taken seriously.
The thing is, in some cases like Git, as I articulated above, Roblox will never be able to provide the same experience, because Roblox does not have the resources. This primarily comes down to source control and external editors. The companies maintaining these are LARGER than Roblox. And they pay their engineers more. The economics don’t make sense.
In other cases, like using an external tool (like a behavior tree editor), there is no way Roblox will specialize into this in a way that is sufficient.
I fully agree with your stance that files are non-negotiable. The collaboration features that Studio has been receiving / are scheduled to receive do not give me confidence that Roblox will offer tools that can match the tools already available from the open-source community and wider industry, and thus I’m a large fan of Rojo and hope that it becomes a officially supported workflow.
There’s no need to re-invent the wheel when there’s the open-source equivalent of a Tesla Model X available to use. For free.
Rojo becoming a first-class citizen within Roblox Studio would be amazing. Rojo is absolutely fantastic as it removes the hindrance Roblox Studio imposes on me, allowing me to work much more productively and use industry-standard tools to get work done (such as a well-built IDE like IntelliJ, and version control via Git).
Roblox I feel should really listen to the community here - those who are actively developing for the platform. I must stress the term “listen” however. Each post should be read thoroughly, digesting what each developer has got to say.
I do however feel Rojo should be decoupled in the sense that it remains open-source. Keeping it open-source allows us, the developers who use the project on a daily-basis, to improve it ourselves by contributing on GitHub.
Roblox treating Rojo as a first-class citizen also has the benefit of allowing Roblox engineers to focus on other features which are unique to the Roblox engine, rather than spending time trying to replicate what other established applications (IntelliJ, Visual Studio Code, Git, etc) have already developed and trying to keep up.
Rojo allows developers to use external tools with almost limitless possibilties in general. It allows us to efficiently manage huge games with thousands of assets, hundreds of code files on teams with dozens of people (it even lets us onboard people from the industry who know nothing about Roblox!).
Part of Roblox’s vision is to support studios that consist of over 100 developers (source : RDC 2019). In order to meet that vision, external tooling/workflow support isn’t even a want - it’s an absolute need.
I’ve not been using Rojo for very long but being able to know where my files are and have multiple versions of them with Git is unmatched.
I’ve been working using team create a lot recently and it’s more stress than it should be. I’m having constant issues with publishing packages and committing drafts ~ it all feels very unintuitive. Having collaborative Git projects makes it so that a team can fork from the original and not accidentally break everything when making changes.
I’m all for something like this - the best part is it already exists and works incredibly well.
I also would like to see Rojo if not integrated into studio atleast supported. The few devs that still talk to me do nothing but sing it’s praise for how helpful it is when they abandon old project to start new ones, and from my limited experience using Rojo I feel that that only hurdle in using it is actually getting it setup and started. Once that initial hurdle is passed it can help save a massive amount of time that can be used to allow devs to fix their wood grain.
Here is a situation that could result in a win win: Let Rojo still be a plugin, but one officially endorsed by Roblox. It would appear at the top of the plugin list. But why do not just integrate it?
This would be yet another addition to the already cluttered GUI of Roblox Studio. As a new developer, I CANNOT make it out what does everything even do and what do I need to click and input to make a NPC walk forwards at a speed of 20. Adding Rojo as a feature that you cannot opt out of would add to the clutter and I, as a developer not interested in working with Github, would not use it at all but still have it as an unused option in menus.
The issue with rojo is there is a web server component we’re forced to run. You can’t figure out rojo because the UX is completely separate from studio. This almost-intentional degradation of rojo’s UX is what this post is about.
For a power user, for the people making top games, Rojo isn’t clutter.
So rojo isn’t for you yet! That’s ok, power users really need this feature though. Non-power users don’t need rojo, but I think providing a clean transition to rojo would benefit everyone. Integration is the first step.
I’ve been using Rojo for some of my personal projects and I’ve really benefited from having version control and a external editor at my side during development. I can’t say I’ve used this recently as the more recent projects I’ve worked on were on studio to begin with, but in my time using it and in comparison to my previous projects, I’ve found that my workflow was a lot more streamlined and focused. Obviously, this won’t necessarily be the case for everyone, and I acknowledge that Rojo isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. However, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t support it for those who want to use it.
Roblox has expressed in the past that they want to increase the retention of older users, player wise. However, it should also be noted that developers on the platform also get older over time. While it isn’t a matter of Roblox necessarily losing developers over this (as we are fighting for first-party support for Rojo, it’s not like it doesn’t exist already), it should be Roblox’s goal to enable industry-standard practices, practices that potential and current developers utilise outside of Roblox professionally in their jobs and careers. The goal should be to facilitate every kind of developer and make the platform convenient to work on regardless of who you are.
I’m all for Rojo becoming a first class citizen, but most importantly, I’m all for a platform that facilitates everyone’s workflow and style.
obviously not trying to undermine any of the admins work, you guys rock <3
Rojo / A local file syncing service that uses the tools that I’m familiar with gives me great joy as a developer, it empowers me to quickly create something, to make sure that I write the best code and that we push out a great experience for our users.
The Roblox platforms currently have many teams on it that work together, and even more during the pandemic, remotely. Distant from each other, but connected to all the services that we use. Our development tools are the ones that make sure that we deliver great content during these times with all the teammates all around the world. Businesses are created on the platform that are worth thousands of dollars and couldn’t deliver if they wouldn’t have the tools that are created by some of the brightest minds in our community. And those are the opensource tool developers that we currently know and are also engineers now at Roblox since they showcased that they are capable of making our experience with the product flourish and empower us to deliver the content and work with our fellow teammates.
Git / External editors allow us to grow as developers, adopt professional workflows to make sure that we write code that is checked by our colleagues, stage certain updates in a timeline, quickly investigate when we mess something up, create different branches so that we can have a proper pipeline. Those are the tools that are required to make the platform flourish, to empower your developers. Why would you not welcome these tools and allow them to connect to your product as first-class citizens of the product, why would you need to reinvent the wheel and create features as drafts?
Please start the dialogue with the users that rely on this tools every single day, to the developers that make this great tools, what it would take to make sure that we create a professional environment for those that need it. For those that rely on the platform to make their bills monthly, those that see Roblox development as a job and no longer a ‘hobby’ that they do in their spare time. It is time that we take those people more seriously to create even a brighter future for the platform as a whole.
