New Explorer - Update - Feature Request Edition

[HealthyKarl]

_{This is still a Feature Request, but it is built differently}

_{And I wrote this in a funny way
I would of have spent more time on this, but I just realized that it was not worth it like that}

New Explorer - Update

Hello, everyone! We are going to introduce you New Explorer changes!

Context Menu changes!

We have realized that we completely forgot to add back the icons

So we added the icons back!

Some are still missing, but we plan to add them within the next X years! Along with the issues in the above image

 

But not only that, we also added a new setting “Use All-In-One Context Menu (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta)”

This setting will get rid of all the submenus, allow Creators to choose and personalize how they want

Here a quick demo:

Now, we no longer have to debate internally with Product Managers whether this should be done like that or not, we simply just add a setting for it and let you choose! Very simple!

Note to Roblox Staff: It is actually very simple, it’s all where select() is.

 

And hidden options now appear but will just be disabled, this can be toggled on and off as well!

 

More customization

Customize everything you want! You can even make the text bigger or smaller, the indents and everything will scale along the way!

You can style it how you prefer, as you have all the freedom, you can even match it and base it off the Old Explorer!

This allows you to personalize it to what you prefer incase our current design and or font color doesn’t work well for you! We do this because we care!

All you have to do is click on the color palette at the bottom right on this Dropdown that is unironically named “ClickYoinker” for some random reason.

Accessibility

You can now use the keys on your keyboard again while the Explorer Window is focused to navigate across items in the Explorer.

 

Other utility

You can now right click an Instance to disclude it temporarily from Find All/Replace Search.

 

Add-ons

It can but also can not be possible to give a Creator everything they need. That’s why you will be able to create your own custom entries and customize the Explorer even more!

But first we have to move more stuff from C++ into Luau, especially Serialization utilities!

_{Help :Invoke and :OnInvoke}

Ah… oh no…

 

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As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to …

Comprehend that Roblox has done none of the above, yet.

But they removed FFlagInstancePickerComponent4 even though the New Explorer nor the blurry text is not fixed yet.

If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because …

Implement Customizing Design and the Icons and no-submenu setting to improve the experience! :)

[Mauio64 (Mauio)]

What is this feature request even about? What is the feature you’re requesting? It’s hard to understand what exactly you are asking out of the explorer when there’s 5 different requests and off-topic anecdotes littered throughout the post.

[HealthyKarl]

So, above I demonstrated a modified version of the Explorer, where I did the changes that Roblox didn’t do yet. _{Or at least a few of the changes}

To say that:

• Roblox has not brought back the icons to the Context Menus, and some entries are still missing.
• Roblox has not offered a way to get rid of the submenus in the new Explorer unlike shown above.
• Roblox has not fixed StyleSheets being able to set the size with floats, which fuzzes text
• Old features from Qt are still not implemented in the Explorer, and probably won’t be for a long time.
• Roblox does not let a Creator yet control what is shown in the Context Menus in the Explorer
• A Roblox Staff mentioned that they don’t want to add custom styling to the Explorer? Above is a demonstration that there’s no technical limitation to support it though, just needs slight tweaks.
  • Yet, they disable things like the Old Find All/Replace, where the new one is still blurry on some screens, and you can’t adjust anything regarding the style.
  • FFlagInstancePickerComponent4 disappeared despite the Old Explorer and Properties flags being present. That shouldn’t have been done, now you can’t cleanly disable the New Explorer anymore.
  • The New Explorer is slightly bigger and you don’t get offered the ability to change that, despite it being done with React. The font isn’t even fully white and we don’t even have ClearType.

 

Next Gen Studio and Explorer - Icons and Collapsibles issue feedback and A11Y

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to … To accept the new Next Gen Studio and Explorer (not because the blurry UI only, apparently it came back or the font changed on next gen, but… yeah not only because of the blurry UI or not having the option to change the theme) I don’t know if the Foundation Colors flag is meant to stay, I hope it will not go… What was the point of creating Style Sheets if there’s no plan to use them with care on the new Luau built-in Plugins? Technically, I …

Roblox Staff is either scared to approach these changes or I don’t know. So, the purpose is to show the changes, to demonstrate that they’re possible and see what happens next

 

And this one is just for Roblox Staff

• The methods Plugin:Invoke and Plugin:OnInvoke are cool but kinda limiting and there’s this cool error screen I found. I wish there would be a function that can take a serialized instance as an argument to create a new one across DataModels. Exporting it as Base64 into a file and dragging it into Studio, is annoying.

The Explorer uses these two methods to communicate with itself.

[Dogekidd2012]

In general, please do not bundle a bunch of feature requests in one. It makes it very hard to track.

This, for example:

@HealthyKarl

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to …

Comprehend that Roblox has done none of the above, yet.

is unhelpful and not something we can act on. Feature requests is primarily for describing the problems you are facing.

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@HealthyKarl

You can now use the keys on your keyboard again while the Explorer Window is focused to navigate across items in the Explorer.

If you mean typing the first letter of the name, we are not bringing this back:

Next Gen Explorer has officially rolled out!

FYI, and because other people are asking about it, we intentionally opted not to bring this feature back for two reasons. It conflicts with any shortcut that consists of a single letter. In the new Explorer, you can press “F” to immediately jump to an instance, but even with it in view you can focus it on the 3D viewport. Having a UX that only sometimes works depending on what you have bound is not a good experience. It doesn’t scale. Imagine you have a hundred thousand instances. You press Q,…

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@HealthyKarl

So we added the icons back!

The no icons is an intentional design decision as part of next gen studio. You’ll find the same is true for the tab menus, and right-clicking in viewport (except insert part, for some reason). While that is not to say you shouldn’t make a feature request for bringing them back, it should be about the general Studio direction rather than Explorer specifically.

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@HealthyKarl

But they removed FFlagInstancePickerComponent4 even though the New Explorer nor the blurry text is not fixed yet.

There is no expected behavior for modifying fast flags. The old explorer flags are pending removal very soon.

[HealthyKarl]

@Dogekidd2012

is unhelpful and not something we can act on. Feature requests is primarily for describing the problems you are facing.

I tried once.

The problem I am facing is that you can’t personalize the Explorer to your liking, you can’t solve contrast issues, you can’t tweak how the text appears to make the text appear better on some screens, since there’s no ClearType in the Roblox UI and Roblox doesn’t seem to be always around to fix it.

You couldn’t personalize the old one, but the old one didn’t have blurry text or no ClearType. Except a few other artifacts like “lines”.

 

@Dogekidd2012

The old explorer flags are pending removal very soon.

The issue is that flags go away while the new product is not fixed. For example Find All/Replace rolled out but Style Sheets still set TextSize values like 17.6 instead of 18 or 17 which causes the text to be blurry. Explorer Plugin and etc. strange StyleSheet float values on TextSize can cause blurry text, DPI issue, some StyleSheets have strange values

So, then I just turn it off, until to the point where the flag gets removed. But was the problem solved or not at the time the flag gets removed?

 

The blurry text was mentioned at the early beginning. There was a fix, but that didn’t work.

@Dogekidd2012

We are not entirely sure what specifically the underlying issue is, although the team have investigated this in the past.

@Dogekidd2012

There’s no simple fix or setting we can flip, this is all pretty in the guts of Roblox’s core text rendering system.

Unfortunately, we do not have plans to fix this soon, and certainly not before the general releases of these beta features.

@Dogekidd2012

This is not because we do not think this is important, but because the fix is very nuanced and the team responsible has more pressing things to work on.

And this is just unfortunate.

 

@Dogekidd2012

The no icons is an intentional design decision as part of next gen studio.

Visual Studio has icons in their Context Menu though

 

@Dogekidd2012

it should be about the general Studio direction rather than Explorer specifically

The Explorer is a tool in Studio and right clicking shows you a list of things to pick from. Icons help to recognize things cognitively. And without them using the tool is a little bit more harder.

The same way where Next Gen Ribbon changed the icons for all the constraints instead of re-using the ones that existed, they don’t match the new ones from the Explorer. Next Gen Studio and Explorer - Icons and Collapsibles issue feedback and A11Y

 

The submenus also add a slight delay in all the access. Imagine if the Explorer would play an animation everytime you expand a node, it would be disturbing and very interrupting. And that’s how I feel about the submenus. Especially with no icons.

 

@HealthyKarl

Help :Invoke and :OnInvoke

This here. I don’t know, but there’s no method to insert a serialized instance, because that would be useful to move things across Standalone and regular DataModel.

[TheRealANDRO (ANDRO)]

@Dogekidd2012

The old explorer flags are pending removal very soon.

Does that mean the ribbon is finally going to be out and the new explorer can finally depend on the Ribbon?

[Dogekidd2012]

I don’t know about the timeline of ribbon release, sorry.

[Dogekidd2012]

@HealthyKarl

You couldn’t personalize the old one, but the old one didn’t have blurry text or no ClearType. Except a few other artifacts like “lines”.

FYI we do have a fix in the pipeline for fixing the non-integer text size. I think it’s ready tomorrow.

[HealthyKarl]

Will regular Plugins in the future be able to alter the Standalone DataModel? The Styling for some stuff is in there

The Explorer has hardcoded numbers, e.g. ident and etc. that break if the styling changes anything like height, the Explorer would have to manually track that, but it’s not impossible.

[Dogekidd2012]

I have no idea what the plans are there at the moment–access to the standalone data model in general would likely not be safe as it is responsible for a bunch of funky things like the start page.

Custom styling of the Explorer may one day be possible (I would like it to be), but it would likely be a part of a larger initiative for tweakable Studio values. We wouldn’t really want to create an Explorer specific mechanism for it.

Other than that, I highly recommend you split this feature request into smaller feature requests. As of now, it is not actionable.

[HealthyKarl]

@Dogekidd2012

I have no idea what the plans are there at the moment–access to the standalone data model in general would likely not be safe as it is responsible for a bunch of funky things like the start page.

Ah yeah…

I was thinking about on how Plugin:Invoke and OnInvoke could be used to alter the styling for the Explorer specifically.

Another thing was to just send a Theme through, but I don’t think there’s a method to create an instance out of a serialized string, right? Unless DeserializeInstance is one. I don’t know what the Explorer does to show me the datamodel, I wanted to actually swap and view the Standalone DataModel, and then make it so that you can be in Client Mode but see the Server-Side DataModel without switching.

[TenebrisNoctua (Noctua)]

@HealthyKarl

Will regular Plugins in the future be able to alter the Standalone DataModel? The Styling for some stuff is in there

At the moment I don’t see the team ever adding this support. Would it be awesome? Hell yeah. Would it require changing the capability system quite a bit so no plugin can access RobloxPluginGuiService? Probably. Like Doge has said, lots of important plugins are in the Standalone DataModel.

[HealthyKarl]

With or without Fast Flag? And is it only for the Explorer or all. Since the Style Sheet can manually be adjusted as well.