LoadLibrary is going to be removed on February 3rd

you can insert the file into a roblox place by clicking insert from file in the explorer (shown below)

5 Likes

I honestly see this as unacceptable, users have paid robuxs that come from IRL money, and you going to be telling users the gear won’t work anymore. What! At the very least you should take a few hours to fix this.

This is what many users are saying, but I believe this to be false. Lots of wargroups use :gear for that matter, many games have the speed coil gear or make a cheaper gamepass for the same gear in there game only and theres more gear that places use too.

13 Likes

I personally think that if there ends up being no sort of “one size fits all” solution, then someone could spend time going through gear after gear and develop a model of sorts that would fix the broken gears whenever people who own them join the game. That would be labor intensive though.

2 Likes

I think you’re missing the entire point of the response and the thread. This is not a good counterargument towards a response in regards to game security at all. You paid Robux for the gear so just use it as an aesthetic for your character just like you use hats.

Roblox has no reason to continue supporting a scarcely used feature. It’s a waste of engineering resources and time. A majority of games don’t allow user-bought gear in their game as it stands.


It’s not false. Roleplaying groups are still a niche use case to continue to support gear in comparison to the entire platform. “War groups” are not a significant part of Roblox at all.

The gear command is typically only used as a substitute when the developers are too lazy to make dedicated equipment for their places or, for whatever reason, want to use catalog gear independent of their games’ systems.

Games don’t use gear from the catalog raw. The whole point of my response was that developers recreate catalog gear or modify it in some way to have it present in their game.


Your intention was to disagree with me, but you’re simply supporting my point here. Developers create game passes to sell existing catalog gear and modify it to work with their games. They don’t just raw insert catalog gear.

Some (not many) games may still use “catalog gear”, sure, but not in the sense that they directly insert a tool from the catalog or tick off one of the “Allowed Gear” options. They use it as a reference point to refactor the code behind it or modify it, or just to use the mesh it has. See:

Not a significant enough reason to continue supporting gear, much less overhaul 20+ pages worth of gear in order to be compatible with current platform standards (including FilteringEnabled). It’s a waste of time and there’s more interest towards future platform prospects.


Please point out to me one game with a significantly large playerbase that uses catalog gear in the sense that an Allowed Gear option is ticked off rather than the gear being modified to work with game systems (e.g. Epic Minigames modifies tools to get rid of extraneous effects such as healing from drinks gears and changes swords to function with certain minigames).

3 Likes

@zeuxcg It might be an easy shortcut for you guys but you can’t just remove this thing that half the catalog of gear uses! If you aren’t aware, some players still play with unmodified gear and have gear fights including me. The fe update already destroyed enough gear as it is, I can’t begin to count how many of my friends quit because they couldn’t use their favorite gear or play their favorite game after the fe update. You guys can’t keep taking these harmful shortcuts. Just because it doesn’t effect the most popular games doesn’t mean you can just ignore it, that’s unfair to your community. :frowning:

6 Likes

They can remove it, they are going to remove it and they should remove it. It’s been deprecated for years. Preventing platform development for extremely niche cases is unfair to engineers and the rest of us waiting for engine updates.

“Some players still play with unmodified gear” isn’t a significant statistic or reason why this update should be held back or cancelled. Please read the thread for the reasoning on why this choice was made

The platform is going to continue moving forward and if your friends don’t want to adapt, that’s their choice. If FE broke their favourite games, it’s up to the game developer to update their game; you can’t lay it on Roblox for something that is not their responsibility.

This update is literally not a harmful shortcut, it’s a benefit. I would much rather see a long-deprecated functionality removed and unblock some paths in internal development over keeping the feature because a small section of the community arbitrarily allows gear in their games for whatever reason.

This isn’t unfair to the community. Games hardly support raw gear anymore, opting to make their own equipment or modify gears to fit their game systems.

12 Likes

Why do statistics mean more than your player’s wishes? All these updates are taking away children’s favorite games and they don’t have any way to get it back, weather it’s because the developer isn’t active or it’s because gear won’t get updated. There are whole communities based around gear that go under the radar and are effected by these harmful updates and they never get to voice their opinion because their statistic isn’t large enough. Can’t you try and work out another solution or change so that it doesn’t cause more problems by trying to fix a problem? Ever since 2016 gear has been destroyed more and more and people like me have gotten effected by it. Any time we’ve tried to bring up the need for change we’ve just been ignored and this is a perfect example. I don’t want anything bad for roblox, I don’t want to make it harder for roblox, I just want my game back. :confused:

4 Likes

Not everyone’s wishes can come true. Accounting for the majority of developers and future prospects is much more valuable than keeping a deprecated, unsupported feature actively blocking internal development and expending engineering resources just to keep a small niche happy that refuses to familiarise themselves with platform updates (see: your thread on wanting to disable FE because you don’t want to learn it).

Statistics matter because they help show a feature’s use and drive decisions behind it (see: genre sorts removed because of declining use and failure from developers to set game genres, as one could not be set by default). Almost no game with a significant playerbase uses the Allowed Gear setting. There’s no point to supporting gear. It’s relegated as an aesthetic.

Again, the removal of LoadLibrary is not harmful at all, please read the OP for information regarding it’s removal. Your posts are more focused on a specific use case rather than addressing the context of the thread. If there are communities based around gear (which I don’t know of any), then it’s up to them to fork gear and modify them to work in their games.

LoadLibrary will only cause a problem for games that are, for whatever reason, still arbitrarily allowing gear use in their games (I will concede for social gears in places like showcases, but AFAIK those don’t use LoadLibrary). It otherwise has benefits in terms of removing barriers to internal development and dropping support for a feature that’s been deprecated for years. You should not be using deprecated items in your work and use of LoadLibrary has warned of such deprecations.

You keep bringing up this point about the update being harmful or you’re being ignored but you aren’t actually bringing any legitimate points to the table. You can’t be ignored if your initial statement wasn’t a question or request, nor if you haven’t spoken about this widely before; your first post was instead a complaint about gears breaking because of FE and LL’s removal despite those being beneficial.

How is this update harmful? What non-niche cases will it actively break across the platform that cannot be solved by

  • Forking copies of the libraries in the OP or Roblox GitHub repository and replacing LoadLibrary with requires on those modules

  • Learning how to make your game FilteringEnabled instead of finding workarounds

  • Integrating gear with your game systems (see: Epic Minigames, as well as the above point)

  • Not using catalog gear and scripting your own equipment for your games as wanted

?

Sorry for my brevity but someone’s gotta tell you: you’re fighting a losing battle. Engineering will be following through with LoadLibrary’s removal as scheduled in the OP and it is almost certain gear will not be repaired without significant cause for doing so. Engineering resources are best placed elsewhere, not on a feature that is hardly used.

15 Likes

Ok I first of all, that topic is about simulating removal, not actually removing it. Second, I know how to script fe and I have a game that I’m working on for proof. Third, like I said, the players can’t do anything about it because the developer may be inactive and unable to fix the in-game gear.

The players matter too. There are games that allow gear, and people play them almost daily, I can even link you a few if you don’t believe me. The problem is that it breaks the game for unsuspecting players who just want to have fun on roblox and they end up quitting. FE actually made sense because it both helped the players and the developers by protecting from exploiters but this is just to make something easier for the engineers.

EDIT: Also, if you aren’t aware, the reason I believe this is harmful is because some games and gear use loadlibrary in their scripts to function properly and when this is removed, they won’t work.

3 Likes

The concept is the same and if it was possible, it would be the same as just outright disabling it.

If a developer isn’t active and doesn’t fix their game, then that’s the end of that. It’s not your business what a developer does to their game - whether they want to continue supporting it or not. Play something different or pilot a fan remake project of the game if you’re really passionate about recreating an experience.

No one said players don’t matter, but it seems like my point is sinking right through. These communities are extremely niche. Its not worth expending resources on a feature scarcely used by the greater majority of Roblox (see: games page).

If games break because the developer isn’t maintaining the game, then that’s a completely isolated circumstance that has very little to do with Roblox’s decision to improve the platform. Roblox makes the decision, up to the developer to adapt or drop support for the game’s development.

Even if this update is solely to make engineers life easier, how does that matter? Update your game and leave other developers to update theirs. Engineering (in the context of platform development) and development (itc. game development) are one of the same: making life easier. Engineers remove features that are not being supported or deprecated; developers apply frameworks, libraries and other utilities in their codebase to make development easier and accessible. The concept isn’t any different. You should make things as easy for yourself as you can.


You’ve made this crystal clear. So has OP and so have I across several posts.

5 Likes

It matters because by taking a short cut to “make their lives easier” they are making other people’s lives harder. Gear fighting is my favorite hobby and it has been since I joined and it keeps getting broken due to these updates. You say that we should recreate games if we really care about them, but you wont be able to fully recreate them because theft of scripts is literally not allowed in the terms of service. Neche or not, you should still at least try and help out some of your smaller communities that play your game. Gear isn’t even cheap, I’ve actually spent hundreds of dollars on gear for it just to be broken and not be updated. I probably sound like a broken record at this point but taking shortcuts that cause bigger problems than they solve makes no sense.

4 Likes

Would it be possible to allow some trusted volunteers to update the gears, similarly like some users are able to create UGC items and sell them? If staff moderation time would be an issue, some of the top contributors on this site could moderate the fixed gears.

10 Likes

Absolutely no one suffers from this update except players playing games that, for the fourth time by now, allow arbitrary unmodified gear to be used in their games for whatever reason, which is not a whole lot and not a significant number to justify making a huge commotion about gear scripts breaking.

I’ve stated everything I’ve needed to in several posts now and the OP has made it clear what engineering’s stance on gear and LoadLibrary are. I’m not going to bother discussing this further since it seems, again, that my points at just sinking through and this conversation is derailing the thread.

Gears are akin to hats, just with functionality in them. You can literally treat them the same way.

This isn’t a shortcut and it’s causing no problems. Actively trying to make it a problem isn’t going to go anywhere either. Gear hasn’t been updated for literally a few years and only now because LoadLibrary is going suddenly it’s a supposedly huge problem.

I’ve said my piece. I rest my case. I won’t parrot myself unnecessarily. :slight_smile:

P.S. That GitHub repository isn’t being maintained. The last commit was 2 years ago. Make sure to check dates.

5 Likes

@colbert2677

People are making a “huge commotion” about it because they don’t want their items to be broken. A gear that says it does something in the description and then doesn’t work in-game because of these updates is literally false advertising and in some ways could even be considered a scam since it requires real money. You clearly acknowledge that people don’t want this update and the fact that you don’t even consider making a change for the better good frustrates me.

3 Likes

Last commit was almost 2.5 years ago FYI, I wouldn’t expect it to get merged.

4 Likes

Honestly, I think the only way to fix this is by modifying the line LoadLibrary() (of a gear that uses LoadLibrary) by getting the asset via Catalog and put it in the ReplicatedStorage then change that line to :Clone() that asset from the ReplicatedStorage.

2 Likes

Is it possible to rewire the LoadLibrary function to use require behind the scenes? Theoretically that would allow you to dump whatever it’s doing now, and these libraries could be required from the Roblox account instead. Doing this would mean existing code in games, tools, and other systems wouldn’t need to break at all.

10 Likes

We’ve considered this but this doesn’t work from the client side. Require by asset id doesn’t work, so the script must be in the game. We can’t just put these scripts into every game, that inflates download size. So we’d need to make the function fetch the script on demand using a special client-server lazy loading mechanism that doesn’t exist. This mechanism would be possible to implement, but of course there’s two extra issues with that:

  • This would mean that LoadLibrary will yield (for the duration of the initial client->server request, which can take a second or more for players with suboptimal connections). It does not yield right now and hasn’t yielded for many many years. This alone may break scripts for various reasons.
  • This would mean that exploiters can trivially, through officially supported means, inject RbxStamper even though it isn’t supposed to be used in-game.

So we’d be replacing one insecure fragile mechanism with another - not a great tradeoff.

18 Likes

tbh, i agree with both sides here.

The game does need to move forward but i do find it a bit silly for the catalog to keep selling broken gears. It is technically false adverting since you’re still selling gear for a lot even when you fully know well that the majority of them are broken.

Honestly, they need to quit selling any broken gear once this update comes out. Thousands of players still do buy gear today so it would be quite wrong to not put broken items offsale. ( Especially newer players who still think all gear is functional. )

2 Likes

If they did, it would still kinda be unfair for the people who know about the gears and still want to use them. Also let’s not lie, if they did the whole catalog would be offsale before anyone knew it.

1 Like