I would love for there to be some kind of container that I can place resources in that does not get published to my Place when I upload my game, but that will remain there when I re-open the place from a save file. Ideally, an “UnpublishedStorage.”
I realize that most other people like to keep their projects in the cloud - they always hit Edit rather than open from a file on disk. There is also Team Create, in which you have no choice but to edit from the cloud. That is why I’d settle for something that does upload but doesn’t get loaded when a server starts, an “EditOnlyStorage.”
It could be used to store the following:
Resources that are only useful or relevant in a Play Solo environment
Objects that are used only by a Plugin, but that I need to be able to access in the Explorer - as an example, one could write all their scripts in this location and have a Plugin that clones and minifies or obfuscates them each and places them where they are meant to go in the “published” hierarchy. This would keep their neater forms from being loaded/replicated but make it so that the author always has access to the original copies
Junk objects that were once in use, but have temporarily been removed from the game and have yet to be determined whether they should be deleted or not
Todo items that haven’t yet been implemented in the game yet but are meant to be soon
I realize that ServerStorage works in most or all of these cases, but why waste the server’s memory on stuff you only need access to while editing?
I also realize this isn’t the most needed feature at the moment, but I’d like you all to stop and consider – does every resource you use during the process of creation need to be uploaded and loaded with each server that hosts your game?
ROBLOX Games, as well as the development thereof, are getting more and more sophisticated. Everyone project has different development techniques, and it just seems that such a service would better suit a wider variety of these styles.
I have a place that’s nearly 10MB now, and despite the fact that I get an average of 939.7 Mbps upload speed, it takes around 15 seconds to upload it to ROBLOX’s servers.
On top of that, I have set it up so that I have to upload it to three different place slots because instead of managing 3 different place files (which would be extremely tedious), the place checks the DataModel’s PlaceId on startup and contextualizes its assets from there.
I know, #FirstWorldProblems, it takes me 45 seconds to upload the game, boo-hoo. This is why I abandoned posting in the first place.
15 second publishing is not a good thing – it’d be great if we could squash this issue. That being said, EditOnlyStorage wouldn’t help with this. Even if you’re not loading it in online servers, it still has to be published alongside the rest of the place so that it’s there when you load up the place next.
Some tips:
To save on file size/publish time, you can publish things you know you wont change anytime soon to their own modules/models and insert them into the game at runtime instead of including them directly in the game file.
If you don’t want things to publish with your place at all and don’t want them to be there when you load it up next, you can set Archivable to false
If you don’t want things to publish with your place but want them to be there when you load it up next, you could set Archivable to false but serialize the object into a plugin’s settings (saved to your local disk) and load in objects in the plugin’s settings whenever the place is opened (the downside to this being they won’t show up for anyone else who’s also editing your game)
Some alternative feature request ideas:
Publish only changes made instead of whole place for faster publish speeds
Official support for publishing to and migrating between test environments all linked to the same place to make handling them easier