In an effort to improve the experience when updating your games we recently introduced a new option on the game details page called “Migrate to Latest Update”. This option will allow developers to quickly roll out an update for a place to all players while minimizing the disruption to the player experience.
Selecting the “Migrate to Latest Update” option ensures a smooth transition by marking all running instances of the current version for that place to be shut down (over 6 minutes) and launching instances of the new version in the background before players are kicked out of the game. This way the players can immediately re-join into the new running instances with the latest update.
We will continue to make the process of updating games easier and will keep you posted on new features we introduce.
Here are some sample screenshots of what the new option looks like.
But, instead of kicking players, can’t you just transfer them to the “new instances”? This way, the player really doesn’t have to rejoin in which they can potentially lose interest to launch the Roblox client again.
Edit: A better option would be to have a button that will transfer that player to the new server whenever they click it (within 6 minutes, of course). This way, they won’t be surprised and any “temporary” progress, like being in the middle of an obby stage, wouldn’t be lost and they can reach a safe checkpoint.
That was just my insight on this, but the update is still pretty nifty (I especially like that it’s spread out over 6 minutes)!
This is not helpful at all sadly, in my game people could lose tons of progress by getting kicked without a warning. if the kick was removed, this would help me out a lot with silent updates.
Shut down all servers although is a nice tool, it simply lacked in a lot of different ways,
Really happy to see this becoming a thing now, though I do have some concerns:
Will we be able to control how and when servers get shut down?
I’m not really liking the idea of the player’s experience being inturrupted all of the sudden,
It would be really neat to have some sort of API that gives the running servers a (minute?) heads up to make sure it can wrap things up for players,
Example: Using the API a round based game can wrap up the round and tell players to rejoin for an update.
This will be extremely useful, I am always unsure about shutting the game down to maintain player counts - this will encourage me to use this for those small updates that aren’t worth shutting the server down for.
The feature is nice and good for developers who want to have a smooth shutdown and update everything inside the game for 6 minutes for fewer, plus the instances to update.
Will this be expanded on to allow for A/B update pushing? It would be handy to push an update to a small selection of servers for “live run” testing before fully pushing the update to the rest.
It would be very cool to gradually transition some servers to A (20-30%) check and monitor the progress and then fully roll out for B also. I know a selection of developers already use their own A/B system in place - but having it implemented by default would be very nice.
This is a great update! I was wondering what that button did, because it’s been there for a few days for me. But one question: Will it be possible to not shut down all current servers, but make it where new servers have the latest version and old servers can’t be joined? Also, does this button show a popup for players that asks if they want to join an updated server?
