Hey Creators,
We’re excited to announce that performance upgrades and quality of life improvements for the Explorer are now in beta. With these upgrades, you’ll be able to handle larger numbers of instances and more complex places in Roblox Studio much more efficiently. Here’s a closer look at what’s new:
- We’ve rebuilt the Explorer in Luau, with a much more efficient architecture. This will allow you to select, edit, and move thousands of Explorer instances without worrying about lags, hangs, or crashes.
Here’s a side-by-side comparison of opening a place with 100K instances. The new explorer is on the left, and the old explorer is on the right:
With 100k instances, the new explorer opens the workspace 79 times faster than the old explorer, in just 2.5 seconds. We had to massively speed up the old explorer’s video to show the old explorer finishing the operation, which takes 197 seconds. In fact, in our testing when we tried to open a place with 1 million instances in the workspace, the new explorer did it in about 19 seconds (though individual results may vary). Meanwhile, the old explorer wasn’t even able to finish the operation!
- We’re adding hierarchy lines to make it easier to see hierarchy relationships between instances. You’ll see vertical lines on the left-hand side that delineate where each hierarchy level starts and ends.
- We’ve significantly improved the Explorer context menu. Right-clicking on instances will no longer bring up a laundry list of greyed-out options; it is now a concise list of actions relevant to your selected object, split into nested categories. Here’s an example of the new context menu in action:
Old Context Menu (Left) vs New Context Menu (Right)
- We’ve made shift + select much more feature-rich. Previously, it would naively select everything from the top to the bottom, regardless of hierarchy. This would often make selections that would break if you, for instance, drag to another location, or if you want to change properties. The new behavior will try to be conscious about the hierarchy of your selection.
- We’re adding selection highlights to a selected object’s hierarchy. Now, when you select an object, you’ll receive a clear indication of the objects contained within your selection’s hierarchy, so you can easily orient yourself within the Explorer and understand the scope of any potential changes. This is toggleable in the 3 dot menu to the right of the Explorer search bar!
- We’re adding new Explorer settings to help you better customize your editing experience, accessible through the 3 dot menu to the right of the Explorer search bar:
a. Select instance after insert: This setting is identical to the one that appears in the insert object menu. When enabled, objects that you insert through the insert object menu will be selected.
b. Increment names for new instances: When this setting is enabled, copy/pasted, inserted, or duplicated instances of the same type will have numbered names so they are easily differentiable. For example, watch what happens when we insert a Part and duplicate it a few times:
Now, we can similarly insert MeshParts and create similar differentiation among the meshparts:
c. Expand hierarchy when selecting: When enabled, selecting an instance within a hierarchy will expand the hierarchy to reveal your selection. When disabled, Explorer will give you an indication that your selection is nested within a hierarchy, but the hierarchy itself will not automatically expand.
d. Show selection hierarchy highlights: When enabled, hierarchy highlights will be visible, as shown in #5 above.
Enabling This Beta
To turn the beta on, navigate to File > Beta Features, and enable Next Gen Explorer.
Known Bugs
There are a few issues we know about and are actively working on fixing before release. We will continue to update this list as we get more feedback. So far, this includes:
- Studio Script Sync is currently not supported when this beta is enabled. This will be resolved in January.
- Missing support for custom icon sets like Vanilla
- Box select is not yet implemented.
- Occasionally, the “Open Script” action in the context menu will read “TBD”.
- Scrolling on Mac is significantly faster than it is supposed to be. This is an issue affecting all ScrollingFrames, which we will resolve before this goes out of beta.
- Some shortcuts (such as Delete) don’t work when the script editor is open. Others, like focusing on the search box, have not been implemented yet.
- The packages UX isn’t complete yet – certain package actions won’t be available in the explorer context menu.
- When using Explorer on monitors with different DPI, the text may get blurry. Let us know if you encounter this issue!
Our goal is to preserve workflows from the old explorer, and ship improvements that make creation even faster. If you’re unable to complete certain workflows with the new Explorer, let us know so we can address your use case.
What’s Next
We’re planning to release even more improvements this year to make organization and quick editing easy from the Explorer. The Properties panel will also be receiving some performance and quality upgrades in the near future, so stay tuned! In the meantime, we’d love to hear your feedback on this beta – what do you like and dislike? What could be better? Let us know in the comments below!
