Since A/B testing started for the Lua Widget toolbox, it has become very difficult for me as a Roblox developer to continue using it.
The move to a lua-based widget is a great step, but there are many quirks and missing features in its current iteration that hampers my development pipeline.
I know issues 1 and 2 are being resolved:
But I am still going to leave them in this thread for historical reasons.
- You can no longer do text and context menu operations in the Toolbox
You could select text, copy it, cut it, among other operations. This iteration of the toolbox doesn’t allow me to do either, other than pasting into the search bar TextBox.
- The toolbox suffers from the unpredictable behavior of MouseEnter/MouseLeave, and scrollbars don’t get “released” when the mouse button is released
Buttons sometimes freak out due to MouseEnter/MouseLeave events’ quirks, breaking the UI at times. The scrollbar also often “sticks” to the mouse, as described in this thread: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/toolbox-being-a-lua-widget/183801/
- Skyboxes are not parented to Lighting by default
This is a minor issue, but is a bit frustrating as we need to manually swap the skyboxes now (considering the previous behavior). This could be softened with a preview of how the skybox would look in the game before inserting it.
- You can no longer filter from creator
This is a much needed shortcut that sometimes saves a lot of time. For example, I might know who made something, but I don’t remember what that something is named.
I unfortunately can not rely on the search engine, so I find something else made by him, browse his assets and insert it from there - without even needing to open the browser and going to his inventory.
- The entire sets functionality is gone
This one is the most important, undoubtedly. Sets have been abandoned for the past six years and have never received attention from anyone, even though they could be one of the most useful tools available to a developer.
Analytics might not say the same, but it is because the average user can’t even access the sets page from any link on the website, nor add items to an existing set, nor subscribe to an existing one. You have to manually type the page in the address bar to access the interface.
They are an extremely handy tool for organizing assets and softkilling such a feature by completely hiding it from everyone is throwing its potential to waste.
I can not select my own sets, nor use other sets such as this one, this one or this one. I have to resort to either going model by model to add every single one of them to my inventory or attempt to use the search engine which hampers me even more.
Please reconsider adding them back.
Thanks for taking your time to read this. I know a lot of effort went into this and that it probably isn’t done yet, so I am giving my own feedback (and possibly lots of others’ too) in hope that these quirks get looked at so everyone’s developing experience can be improved once this goes out. A Lua Toolbox has lots of potential to be the greatest thing.