We have a tradition of releasing a yearly Developer Roadmap to create and maintain transparency between us and our developer community. This year is no exception, and we have just updated the roadmap with the upcoming features for 2020.
This roadmap is not a comprehensive list, but it is designed to give you an idea of the major features planned for this year. Over the course of this year we will continue to update the list and post in this announcement thread when changes are made.
We are trying something a little new this year, where we will display the status’ of the item when we reach the quarter. Would love to hear your thoughts on this change!
Please keep in mind that our vision is evolving, and due to bugs or technical issues may cause items to be delayed. In rare occasions, they may be deferred to a later time. We do this to ensure we are shipping incredible features that improve your Roblox experience.
If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to myself (@nsgriff) or @Sorcus.
The roadmap is always full of just… the best things. This is going to be so exciting and open up many new opportunities for innovation and development on the platform, from showcases to enhanced technology and application within our games. I’m already picking out a few favourites I like there.
Enhanced Audio Search in Marketplace: Audio is such an important part of game design and the lack of depth searching has been very hard on finding assets, especially with the addition of nearly 400,000 pages of APM tracks (I still want more).
Atmospheric Fog: I’m no builder, but this has just heightened my want to get into building. I still have various applications of this for builds I commission or need to add fog to my own plain and simple maps, so I can’t wait to give this a whirl.
Custom Materials: We already know this one.
Skinned Meshes & Bone Instances: Ditto.
Morph Instance (Mesh Deformation): I’ve actually once thought around about dynamic and layered clothing, so I am very interested to see how this will open up opportunities for clothing designers and player morph building.
Plugin Script Permissions: This one I’ve been waiting for for a bit. Plugin injections have been affecting a lot of developers alike and some newer developers may not know how to check for infected code, hence the many threads we generate on that topic. Control over what plugins can do in our games will be a huge workflow enhancement and prevent against malicious developers.
Shared Memory:IS THIS THE EPHEMERAL DATASTORES FROM THE LAST ROADMAP UPDATE? I’ve been WAITING for that and I am STILL on board for it. Being able to securely share data between matches without writing to standard DataStores or using the client-based insecure TeleportData will be SO helpful in an uncountable amount of ways. You can even ease off the load from DataStores when making simple teleports.
Game Content Ratings: Will this replace the current garbage rating system? Please. I actually want to know what’s wrong with my games when players rate them and not have a bunch of either falsified, unthoughtful or botted ratings which in turn jeopardises my own standings either with moderation or the sorts. Having players submit why they rate somethingw will provide much better data and analytics to go through.
Improved Audio Tooling: Need more info!!!
Cloud Scripts: This one is super promising. I’ll wait for more information, but outside deployment sounds absolutely delicious. Does this mean code can run outside of the game environment too? It sounds to me like this will allow us to iterate on game architecture with minimal interruptions to player gameplay (live updates) and we can deploy from, say, GitHub. That would be awesome, because we can better integrate third party tools into our development.
Backup and Restore: Having natively supported restores and backups is super helpful. DataStore outages lately have been amping up and we’re forced to use custom implementations to fight back against that. Not that custom modules are bad, that just means extended tooling. Save data has become such a critical part of most or all Roblox games, and so getting tools to deal with data is much appreciated. I wonder if we’ll ever get a panel to review all the data stored in our games and be able to just edit from there.
Oh sweet! Looking at the roadmap for the new year is always one of my favorite things. Usually I’m unaware that a lot of the things coming were even in development, so it’s like a huge surprise as I read down the list. Here’s to a good year!
Would Roblox face bundles (like animation packs) be added? Would these emote depending on action (i.e. player is damaged?) or blink on loop? Will developers have access to disable these in their games? I’m really fascinated by this. Though these “face bundles” would likely outsell or even outphase regular faces.
I’m more than excited for the new features! Especially these 3. I’ve been learning how to build better and when these features go live, they will definitely spice up everyone’s builds
I wonder if this means that you can make light objects that will do the same thing as the sun does currently like in the way that objects can block it and create shadows. Kinda can’t wait to find out. Too bad it’s scheduled for the end of the year.
Facial animations? MaterialsService? Enhanced terrain vegetation? Mesh deformation?! There are so many things on this roadmap that has me excited. This year is looking absolutely crazy for development on Roblox.
This virus seriously needs to get lost so I can give you madlads the biggest god damn hug in the history of humankind. You guys might very well erase almost every reason not to use Roblox in this year alone.
The script editor based on LSP is interesting. Does this mean you’ll be developing a language server for internal use? If so, is there any chance it will get released to developers for our own use?
Oh my god. I have no words to describe how excited I am for this year!! AAAAA
Can we just stop for a moment to appreciate how much Roblox has been looking forward to meet new market demands and please both developers and players? (I acknowledge some decisions were controversial, but overall it’s more than what I signed up for)
Just take a look at a few points that are planned for the second quarter (basically now!!!)
These are just few of the most wanted features, which have been requested for a while!
And I didn’t even mention that we already got some pretty damn cool things on the past months ( Premium Payout anyone?!??!).
Even if some of these features are deferred, just having 70% of them would already be amazing!
Once again, thank you to all the staff behind this intensive production process.
Looking at the road map, it looks like 2020 has a lot of great things planned for future developers or current developer. Looking forward for myself to see these important!
Audio is such an important part of game design and the lack of depth searching has been very hard on finding assets, especially with the addition of nearly 400,000 pages of APM tracks (I still want more).
Need more info!!!
Premium Payout anyone?!??!).