It should be possible to use Roblox Studio offline

Feature Requests Studio Features
#21

People have been advocating for this for quite some time now, but I think Roblox has become stubborn enough about their decision that at this point it’s beyond them. Despite this, I wanted to post on this thread nonetheless to voice my support for offline studio behavior. There’s no reason why just simply not loading assets should prevent devs from actually working on their games. That’s like holding up a flight because the paint chipped on the livery. I’ve got midterms this week but it’s also Halloween weekend and my game’s Halloween update still isn’t finished. I purchased a Hearse 3D model asset to use in my game as a limited time obtainable item and I can’t even work on the event in the one day I have off before midterms start up because Roblox Studio doesn’t work offline anymore and Roblox has been down.

Even if Roblox wasn’t down though, I think something Roblox has overlooked in this decision is:

internet doesn’t exist everywhere

if someone lives in non densely-populated areas, they cannot develop on Roblox. That is a fact. Especially with Roblox expanding to China, they will feel the effects of this very severely as most places in China that are not along the coast typically do not have very good internet - not to mention, they are going through a bit of a power crisis even for people who are on the grid right now. That’s not to say it’s anybody’s fault - nobody can control whether or not their farmhouse in the middle of nowhere has internet or not without spending loads of money - but if you can drive 15 minutes to an internet cafe to publish, that’s one thing. Driving 15 minutes to an internet cafe every time you want to work on the game? That’s just too much and will drive devs away from the platform very quickly.

This is something Roblox should act on very quickly imo.

43 Likes
#22

Going to bring this back. Like the dude above me, I lost money and now, I am not happy.

Intro

Roblox has been down. Developers have been frustrated. Both entities [Developers & Roblox] have lost significant money. Difference is that Roblox can recover. A small development studio can’t. There’s absolutely no reason that Studio shouldn’t be able to work offline.

Examples

a). Developer logs in to the application. Authentication details are established. Therefore any request you made from the application to the webapi is authenticated. Constant internet connection is not needed.

b). You create an instance on studio (part, script, etc). These instances are naturally static. Therefore, a(n) constant internet connection is not needed.

c). Creating a local server. You’re creating it on your local machine. What connection other than localhost do I really need when I have no need for datastores, friends, users, catalog items, avatar loads? Constant internet connection is not needed.

Body

As a developer, I do not need access to production level technologies (datastores, user API, friends API, etc) unless I explicitly declare it. It makes absolutely no sense that production-level services are used in a development environment by default. It completely breaks the purpose and standards that development testing abides by.

Scenario

When I’m testing a web app, I am not testing it in production. My in-dev web app would never be on my main domain. Instead, it’ll be on localhost. I would have an actual process to deploy a release candidate or stable release. I wouldn’t default directly to a development branch.

Questions

  • Why does it default here?

  • Why is it so important that my avatar be loaded in perfectly during an studio development play test?

  • What is being sent from my machine to Roblox that needs a constant internet connection?

    • Automatic saves aren’t happening. Those are local.

    • I can’t see real time changes through play because, it’s a manual button.

    • I’m not constantly checking the asset store, so there’s no need to keep it fresh near instantly

  • Are you collecting data from me that I don’t know about for business intelligence purposes?

  • Are you pinging the site an absurd number of times?

Body 2

A lot of what can be accomplished doesn’t need studio to have a constant internet connection. If you’re [Roblox] using it for real-time metrics, assurance for the asset store, friends, users, clothing or related, it should be able to be untethered from Studio and the option to do so should be provided to developers. The basic principle of testing a singular game without fluff should’ve been provided years ago. Relying on Roblox to just work is not in my best interest and left me completely vulnerable to situations such as this. Like the dude above me, I am a college student. I have limited time. Friday and Saturday were supposed to be days that I could work on this. Instead, I was greeted with a problem that I know nothing about, no timeline whatsoever on when it’ll be fixed and studio (the only thing I need), is essentially functionless.

Stop Maximum Reliance to the Cloud

This is why you don’t rely on the cloud completely. Because when it goes down, everyone is at a loss. Even after this was made clear through the numerous times of how unreliable the cloud has been and how hard it is to get internet is some areas, Roblox has still failed to recognize that integrating the cloud completely screws developers. Not only that but, not everyone has internet or stable connection every waking moment. I am on a college campus and my internet goes out quite a bit. Because of this fixation of the cloud, I have struggled to be able to develop my own game. Not because I lack tools but, because I didn’t have internet for services I don’t need.

Impact

I am aware that Engineers and whatnot are working hard on fixing this issue that has cause the site to go down and I am grateful that someone out there gave up their weekend to fix this. However, the sad and often cold reality of this is that they’re getting paid. Developers are not. At this point in time, a lot of developers have lost significant money during Halloween weekend. On top of that, developer’s have lost the means to even remotely finish our updates before Roblox comes back.

Plead

To the product manager, engineer or person who decided that this was not a good idea, please reconsider. If this point in time (Roblox has been down for two days before Halloween) isn’t a good scenario as to why Studio needs to be offline compatible after a lot of developers and yourselves [Roblox] have lost quite a bit of money and development time, nothing is.

Edit: Blows my mind how this whole thread has been ignored despite every post have legitimate concerns and overall feedback.

65 Likes
#23

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.

38 Likes
#24

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. :slight_smile:

7 Likes
#25

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.

7 Likes
#26

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

7 Likes
#27

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.

1 Like
#28

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.

2 Likes
#29

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

1 Like
#30

There isn’t much benefit to it being forced online when you literally open a local place file.

3 Likes
#31

Back then in the 2009-2014 I believe, Roblox Studio was available to be used offline. I don’t know why they changed this around honestly.

#32

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.

4 Likes
#33

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…

1 Like
#34

I have no idea why Offline mode isn’t a thing.

6 Likes
#35

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.

7 Likes
#36

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!

2 Likes
#37

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.

3 Likes
#38

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.

2 Likes
#39

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.

4 Likes
#40

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.

1 Like