Hello!
I’m currently making a game with my friend. It’s our first game together and I’ve been wanting to dabble into frameworks. I’ve looked into frameworks such as Knit, but would like to hear more options!
I’m familiar with frameworks and scripting as a whole, just would like more input on what the ‘industry standard’ is!
It might be worth noting that knit doesn’t support roblox parallel processing(at least in a conventional way)…
My advice would be not to rely on a “Framework” but use a variety of quality tools that get the job done.
In my main projects I use the following open source assets:
ProfileService and ReplicaService compliment each other very well.
Other Datastore Modules
– You don’t have to use a datastore module however if your game has trading or important player data then I suggest to use them.
Admin Control
– You can use admin guis too, there are plenty. I use Cmdr because it’s more than an Admin panel and helps a lot with testing your game for bugs!
Replication
– If your game is simple then standard remotes are perfect. FPS Shooters or high performance games may need a networking module (buffer module)
Visual
Audio
– This module was modded from a previous Roblox template, it has preloading and effect playing functions too. (I mainly use it for BGM)
(Other) Utilities
There are many free resources in #resources:community-resources . A lot of them were compiled into a list: # | best posts - free/paid | #. Some of these are paid but they are still awesome 
You’ll be surprised that the “industry standard” framework for Roblox is: none!
You see, scripting is simply just a way for developers to interact with Roblox’s engine for their games to do stuff. Sure, there are some nitty gritty details about the language and API that you got to look out for, but generally speaking every property, method or signal you interact with in Roblox is already pretty abstracted away for you.
This is why frameworks are fundamentally flawed. Abstracting already abstracted APIs like RemoteEvents and ModuleScripts in the name of modularity and keeping convention. It’s quite pointless, and worse, hurts productivity and runtime performance. Just see how many mistakes Stephen makes in his tutorial.
The second and more drastic thing I’d like to mention is the unhealthy tendency for frameworks and OOP to make you splinter state and logic across multiple files. You split everything up into nice Singletons and Classes that expose interfaces that lets them talk to each other.
But wait! What if PlayerService.lua tries edits a field from AttributeService.lua? Well, now you’ve shared mutable state between multiple scopes. But isn’t that the same reason you’re told to avoid global variables? It is, since now PlayerService could screw with AttributeService and any other script that reads/writes from it. I would write more about this specific problem, but here’s a great video that goes more in-depth about this.
So, how are you supposed to organize your scripts then? Everyone has their own style, but the way I like doing stuff is having all logic packed into one Server.lua and Client.lua which have different segments of code for each element of the game.
do end blocks work fabulously with this.
-- Player
do
local Players = game:GetService("Players")
local Data = require(script.Data)
local Analytics = require(script.Analytics)
local function OnPlayerAdded(Player: Player)
if not Data:CanGetData(Player) then
Analytics:Log(`Failed to load data for Player {Player.UserId}`)
end
Data:Load(Player)
end
local function OnPlayerRemoving(Player: Player)
Data:Save(Player)
end
Players.PlayerAdded:Connect(OnPlayerAdded)
Players.PlayerRemoving:Connect(OnPlayerRemoving)
end
This way, modules like Data and Analytics simply act as extra abstraction for your logic. They don’t store or interact with state, so your flow of code is much more predictable.
Edit: The creator of Knit also actually made a blog about what he thought was fundamentally wrong with his framework! I recommend you check it out.
I recommend functional programming if possible (and OOP for some cases), for Roblox at least. Most games on here do NOT require any sort of ‘framework’ and do well with just case-to-case scripts and modules.
Get the modules you need, use efficient and well-commented code and you should be fine. Figuring out the scope of your game first and fleshing out the actual gameplay is way more important.
All this ‘framework’ nonsense is just developers trying to sound smart and cool. It’s not like one-size-fits-all. Ain’t nobody need all that extra junk for just a simple game.
any changes since the time of posting?
Honestly, learning to do it yourself is the best way. @index_self said it best as well as @Interactivated . Although i believe some people still use Knit’s framework. Please don’t its not receiving updates anymore and the creator advised people to not use it.
This is a very good list. I use a lot of these in my projects.