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.
what does that mean? You mean cable internet? Either way, i’d prefer offline functionality unless you want people to not able to work on their roblox game when they have no internet (i mean i guess they can touch grass or do something else like play another game, mod some game idk)
While I am totally in favor of this, I don’t think it’s pretty feasible to achieve.
Almost everything that is done in Roblox Studio is synchronized with the cloud. In addition, many functions of Studio such as content moderation, asset management, sound streaming, and mesh uploading, require an internet connection with the Roblox servers. Authentication is also something to keep an eye out for. Even if it was possible, the limitations this change would bring would make offline Studio a painful experience.
Let’s not compare an independent, open-source local program on your PC with an online social/gaming platform like Roblox. There are huge differences between VSC and Roblox Studio.
What upsets me most, is that this was always possible in the past. I used to be able to use studio offline, and then they changed that. Assets wouldn’t load, but that was to be expected.
Primarily, I mostly just write code now-days. I rarely find myself needing to interface with the purely online components of studio; I know which APIs require internet, and I know which ones don’t. I should be able to use the application offline again, as I was perfectly happy doing so, before Roblox decided to start strictly enforcing a connection.
Sorry for bumping this thread but this keeps getting more and more relevant.
Roblox outages are happening every week (I think we are on a 5-week streak where Roblox has an outage every Saturday). It is frustrating as someone who primarily works on my projects during the weekend.
It’s crazy, sad and overall pathetic that this thread still has to be revived over and over because of the absolute ridiculousness of Roblox’s stability if somebody ANYBODY from roblox could’ve seen this added some form of offline studio or at least allow the old way like @AskWisp and @nenen said it’s a shame for roblox because its money that THEY are losing
This isn’t the point. We mainly need to be able to work on our code and build using primitives. I save my project to a file and should be able to work on it. Understandably, meshes/images may fail to load (although it would be great if we could see ones that are already cached.) I would also like to be able to start up server+client windows; It’s completely fine if some services don’t work. My project doesn’t depend on anything like that to run.
Multiple times I’ve ended up with just 1 precious studio window open during an outage that I work on for hours, without being able to open a second window. This is my workday. I have a family and allocate my time for this work. Outages cost me time and make me less productive, although mainly it’s just infuriating.
Sure, ideally it would just work all the time, but there are just too many points of failure. People who work every day will be affected by nearly every outage, big or small.
Edit: In addition, offline support would generally speed up our iteration time. Every additional web request we need to sit through when we start a new window or server is wasted productivity and wasted infra cost. I don’t really care if session analytics are sent; just don’t hang the window while doing it.
Yeah what Roblox could do is store all of current decals and meshes in the current session into a temporary cache somewhere and when the studio session is done/closed. It cleans the cache.
This should be de-facto on Roblox. It’s extremely backwards to be given a local file and then, to not be able to work on said local file without an internet connection. The point of local is to be local.
I was thinking about this today and this might have some relevance or be a possible solution: cached models may not always work because, in order to be cached, they have to be stored in memory. Caching at this scale is also a bit unreliable but, I think you’re on the right track. Perhaps, what we need is mesh fallbacks (term is growing on me a little). I.e meshes that cannot load due to an internet restraint can be loaded locally through a path stored of the system. In offline mode, it would either switch to an on-device fall back or simply, not load. Intuitively, having that choice between local when an internet connection is not present still allows you to see the environment and code as if it were there.
I think the solution to this problem & to get offline Studio an actual possibility would be the option to disable and enable different services in game. For instance, disabling certain web-based services would enable offline compatibility while some would not. If you wanted a more streamline approach, certain APIs would be disabled in offline mode automatically.
I.e a “game.isOffline” property that allowed you to dynamic enable test environments or having web-based APIs default to an error message that states the API has been disabled in offline mode.
Another option for cloud-based saves is to store all save requests in a cache and the next time Studio is open with an internet connection, it could automatically send it. Firebase (a mobile-first database) does something similar when an internet connection falls or the connection is not stable. I think that treating games like a hit repository and updating the source (on device) and pushing to the cloud intently is a much better approach.
Unfortunately, it’s extremely hard to blindly and vaguely suggest system software design changes to a closed-source product. So, these are all just suggestions at most. If I had to take a guess, I think the engine / studio is deeply routed as a cloud-first-based product. De-tethering it could be a generational effort without a clear plan or proper solution.
Great to see that this is getting much more traction.
I don’t expect any of these features to work. I work off of a local file. I should able to edit my code if my internet goes down. It would be helpful to be able to test my code as well. I don’t expect meshes or sounds to work. I just want to test my code, however, I know it would be possible for cached Roblox assets to display while offline; I would be surprised if loaded sounds/images weren’t already cached somewhere.
I’m not asking for offline installers or anything like that. Roblox Studio is a development environment that I work with full-time. I need to be able to reliably use it. I was referring to Visual Studio, not Visual Studio Code. Although it makes no difference. They are tools for editing projects. They shouldn’t self-destruct if your internet goes out.
In addition, I believe iteration time would be improved for all developers, even while online, if Client+Server didn’t require an authentication handshake. My project already takes seconds to initialize, and this handshake makes it take longer to see the results of my changes. I also wouldn’t mind the return of play-solo, where server+client run in a single window that you can have multiple of. We need quick, practical workflows. I would never risk my development session freezing/crashing by running in my main development window; My project is complex and I’m just not comfortable with it for various reasons.
Actually you can use the studio while being offline
You must be on Roblox studio menu and you should have a saved file of a game even if its empty baseplate
Click file and open the saved game from there
Also there will be some functions that wont work like :Destroy() and somehow you will be able to put parts inside the game also your skin wont load
That’s if you enter studio with an internet connection. Without a connection, it refuses to start.
In addition to this, it would also be nice if we could use studio without a logged in account. Local files are not tied to a Roblox account, so it is not necessary to be logged into studio for that reason.
Unless the code you want to test is print("Hello world"), this sentence has a lot of sacrifices for what you want to achieve. You can only work with local game files and nothing more, that extends further than the very base game. Features like texture rendering, sounds, some UI elements and many more scripts that require services that aren’t available locally will simply break or not function.
That’s because Visual Studio pre-installs all the dependencies you are gonna need, so it will of course work offline. Roblox is mostly hosted on the cloud since most of its features are not feasible to be available offline, or will make your experience extremely limited and horrible.
Roblox API calls such as datastores, or accessing other player/game data require a way to authenticate the party who is making the request. If you allow anyone to do it with an unauthorized or even with no account, there is no way to detect or throttle requests where needed.
The roblox player already caches assets of recently played game(s) for faster rejoin times. Doing this for studio is a logical step that probably already exists to some extent.
Most code actually doesn’t need cloud access at all. Often roblox functions that need to acces remote data explicitly state this using ‘GetAsync()’. These functions could just return a default boolean value if offline.
Assuming there’s no team create crashes, there’s no doubt an offline experience will be worse than an online experience. But an experience is way better than no experience.