Over the past week, we’ve had 3 studio outages. I keep seeing announcements about how Roblox is improving some aspect of studio, whether that be the script editor, some UI improvement, or some new feature for builders. The open source community is building better and better tooling off platform. Not because we have to, but because we need to. Studio right now is, quite frankly, a joke.
If I am unable to reliably work on Roblox projects using Studio, I’ll do one of two things:
Use tooling that lets me continue working without relying on Studio
Stop developing on Roblox
While I have personally tended towards the first of the two, I know of people who have moved to Steam, creating their games in Unity or Unreal Engine.
You say you want professional game development studios to create games on Roblox, but why would any studio decide to make games on Roblox when it’s possible for their entire team to come in on a Monday and be unable to get any work done because working on projects offline doesn’t fit Roblox’s vision.
Imagine this scenario: I have a team of 100 people getting paid an average yearly salary of $62,610 ($30/hr). What this means is that if Roblox is down, and they can’t get work done, I still have to pay them. Whenever there’s an outage, I lose $24,000 purely because Roblox doesn’t allow us to work offline. If I saw this as a game development studio considering where to make my next game, I would just ignore Roblox altogether. I’m aware that you pay out studios making money off of existing projects when there’s an outage, but why would I as a new or off-platform studio with no Roblox-based income want to take this risk?
You say that you want Roblox to be taken seriously, yet your actions say otherwise. You keep pouring resources into making Studio better, yet all of the professional studios making Roblox games are using anything but Roblox Studio. You can keep wasting money by adding features to an unusable joke of a product (Studio), or you can make that product (Studio) actually worthwhile by not forcing us to be online to use it.
As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to open Roblox Studio. Roblox is my full-time job and if I can’t use Studio, I can’t work, and therefore can’t make money. Please let me use Roblox Studio all the time so I can pay my rent.
As a Roblox developer who works full time on the platform. Whenever there are internet issues or server outages, I am completely bricked of doing any work.
Normally this is resolved and is not a long standing issue, However, I have to constantly rely on a strong bandwidth of internet + the servers working at proper capacity in order to work well.
The moment there are connection issues (meshes aren’t loading, animations aren’t loading, sounds aren’t loading, textures aren’t loading, avatars aren’t loading, etc…) It adds additional work overhead of having to deal with these issues and can slowly but surely cause a lot of wasted dev time. Especially when they’re breaking critical parts in your game or just bloating up the output console with hundreds of non-helpful cloud error messages.
Just under a year later and this is still an issue, I’ve moved into a room where the internet isn’t as good and team create slowed to a crawl (not that it was fast to begin with)
Regardless, thats not the main issue, the wildly inconsistent state of my internet makes Studio take ages to load assets sometimes and other times it just sits there doing nothing.
Studio needs to work offline, stop trying to make it a “cloud based editor”, no other professional software is this invested in forcing an online connection this hard.
Another software I use is Ableton, this NEVER requires an active internet connection
Besides the tens of reasons why this should be a basic feature, as a Mac user this would be especially useful. I find that places with teamcreate enabled crash frequently and if I was able to edit offline this would be very helpful.
When you buy software, you can usually use it offline. It is part of the licensing. Take MS office for example, it doesn’t require internet for any use. Roblox has fallen into the same grave that all cloud attempted solutions have, with the removal of Play Solo and now offline mode.
What I do is I have a 2017 studio installation ready so I can pull it up when I’m offline. Roblox didn’t have any reason to do this, since it was more secure, faster, and more reliable when offline, because you didn’t have to wait for Roblox servers to send anything.
Team create being enabled by default is a whole other story, but it’s not a good one either.
However, for now, using an older studio client is the solution.
I wonder they are doing it because they think its because exploiters could do malicious stuff on Studio if it was offline, but that doesn’t make much sense considering exploiters exploit Roblox Client, not Studio.
I can’t think of any good reason they are removing offline functionality, i’d say they should re-introduce stuff like Play Solo and offline functionality
I know why, its because Team Create. They want to force Team Create to be the default option and slowly remove ability to disable it, because they believe that collaborative development is the future.
Hope i’m wrong tho, sounds like a nightmare honestly.
They have this vision that roblox studio HAS to be an online experience, with team create, assets such as images and meshes that need to be loaded from roblox servers, and the push of Open Cloud and similar projects…
If your internet gets interrupted while you’re working on something that does not have team create turned on, you’ll still be able to continue editing as long as you’d like and save it as a file on your computer, then once your internet comes back reopen the file and save it as whatever you’re working on; however I’m not 100% sure if you can start Studio without internet. But I fear—with the current beta of team create being enabled by default—that Roblox will eventually force every universe to be in collaboration mode making offline editing impossible.
I hope that there will always be the option to disable Team Create.
I do not like the autosave function.
And–as you said–if my wifi DOES GO OFFLINE, then Studio will still be waiting for me when it comes back!
And that’s exactly my point. Let alone how their data centers will be literally flooded by dummy places. This is so stupid. Wonder how many more outages there’ll be if they force Team Create.
I remember back around 2012-2014 when you could actually use studio offline. Everything worked just fine; the only thing you might run into problems with was audio. Even many decals worked, somehow. I could go camping and spend an hour or so at night doing studio work. Then one time several years ago I tried opening a place file offline and none of the brick colors loaded, everything was grey and plastic (since materials didn’t load either) and it was unusable whatsoever. Boy, was that horrible. It was around the time that studio got the dreaded ribbon UI update that offline stopped working completely.
Studio was able to be run offline until around 2018. You could easily use a 2016 studio without internet access today.
They were loaded into memory since they were cached.
I remember that as well, and a few updates later you were unable to start studio offline. This brings me to think that maybe single player games would benefit if Roblox added an install option for a game which would Play Solo on your computer, since they can be used offline.
Singleplayer games on Roblox can’t work because all assets, scripts are all stored in Roblox servers, even if the game server can be hosted locally, it would still need to send requests to Roblox’s servers sadly, so you still need internet access unless you like grey parts. (Also security reason, Roblox hasn’t added any IP related protection for developers apart from send request to Roblox to get leaked place banned, and or what to do if game experience contains assets from outside without permission? If it’s downloadable then everyone can get it and reupload.) I’m not gonna talk about cheating because it just pointless to ruin your own experience in singleplayer roblox games, but either way while concept of singleplayer games that are also offline-compatible sound nice, it won’t work in Roblox because of how the system is structured.
Altrough i doubt they remove offline support from studio entirely, sure you can’t launch studio without internet connection but atleast you can Play test if you had it open, just assets wont load since its unintended and Roblox expects users to always be connected sadly.
Although that is true, why can’t Roblox implement a system where it tracks down and downloads all required assets? After all, I suggested the idea of “installing” the game.
Roblox already has a system to prevent reuploading assets.
I feel like staying online for studio is not a good thing since many users connect to public internet and with team create enabled by default other users can see what data you send and receive over the network and try to steal it. Someone can potentially steal your Roblox place if you use studio like this.
