November 2019 Recap: Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Updates Community & Events
#1

Hey developers,

November was a pretty spectacular month for the developer community. Let’s reflect on what we saw!

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Live-Ops

There’s usually a big section on Live-Ops with a collective thank you for every game that participated that month. Well, the Live-Ops program is on hold while we revamp it for 2020. You can read about it here: An update on Live Ops

Updates and Changes

Holiday Schedule for the DevEx Team

Get your DevEx requests in! The DevEx team, much like the rest of Roblox, will not be in the office later in the month. That’ll mean slower processing times for your DevEx requests.

There’s a new type of Medium article in town! :cowboy_hat_face:

Okay, so this one isn’t new, but we’re still looking for new content to publish on our Medium publication. You may notice that each time I put this in a Monthly Recap, my pleading gets more and more intense. Please, oh please, let us show the rest of the game design industry how smart Roblox developers are, and that Roblox development is serious business!

Introducing New and Improved Plugin Management!

Whoa, that’s pretty cool, right? Check out the announcement to learn all about our new tools for plugin management!

Improvements to Packages in Studio (November 2019)

Read this one for a rundown on the latest updates to Packages!

Terrain - Water, Water Everywhere + Big Brushes

This is where I would put a water pun, but I’m afraid my creativity well is running dry. Anyway, read this announcement to learn about the fun new changes to Terrain editing… including sea level and bigger brushes!

Luau Progress Recap

Zeuxcg captivated us with an update on Luau, our faster Lua VM. Check it out!

LoadLibrary is going to be removed on January 6th

Please enjoy us in wishing LoadLibrary a happy retirement. It’s going away on January 6th. Please read the announcement, especially if you’re still using LoadLibrary.

Studio Beta. It’s For Everyone!

You read that correctly - the Roblox Studio Beta Features can be used by anyone and everyone. Learn how to opt-in to beta features through this lovely announcement.

GetJoinData now includes SourceGameId

Rejoice, for GetJoinData now provides SourceGameId alongside SourcePlaceId when called. Read the announcement for more information.

New: Set Custom FrameRate in Animation Editor Beta

Now you can set your own custom frame rate for animations in the Animation Editor. Nice! Check out the announcement to learn more.

Minor change to Model:MoveTo

Previously, Model:MoveTo would internally call JoinToOutsiders, which wasn’t ideal at all. Now, the function only moves the model. No joints attached!

Default Shirt and Pants To Be Applied If The Requested Ones Are Unavailable/Moderated

Now, deleted shirts and pants will no longer make you appear in your birthday suit :flushed:.

There’s a new Robux icon!

“People have told me that I don’t look the same.” There’s a new look for Robux! Go to the announcement to grab copies of the icon in the form of .svg files.

Further Changes to the Developer Forum

We made some changes to the Developer Forum in October. Well, in November we took it even further. Except in one case, where we decided to bring it back in a little bit. Read the announcement to find out what that case was!

Release Notes

THE NUMBERS, MASON!

Introducing Grass

I saved the best for grass. Wait, that’s not right… Regardless, we released Grass for Studio back in November so that you can test how your game looks with it enabled. As of today, it’s now live on the client too! We were thrilled at how many of you responded with screenshots of your games using Grass. Read the announcement for more information, and read the replies if you want to see a bunch of pictures of grass - really cool pictures of grass!

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November was really awesome! We anticipate some more fun stuff in December as the year wraps up. With that said, all of us here at Roblox wish you happy holidays and hope you have a wonderful month :heart:!

Thanks,
Developer Relations

97 Likes
#2

A lot of cool updates have been made this November.

3 Likes
#3

A ton of stuff has happened including 3d grass, better plugins, LuaU progress, studio beta being opened, having the source game id (no more arrays of place ids), and more!

Thanks to all the teams at Roblox for making these updates possible. Keep them coming!

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#4

This month was deffintely filled with action! Thanks for the attention and all the great updates and tweaks you have been doing.

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#5

productive month i must say
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3 Likes
#6

Great month in my opinion, keep it up guys. ^-^

#7

Woah… I didn’t know coefficients was that buff… no wonder the updates are coming out so strong. Easily my favorite month of update, let’s keep this streak going!

#8

Looks like he accidentally leaked Weight Lifting Simulator 3.

3 Likes
#9

Now let’s see what december will offer :eyes:

Nice. :cake:

1 Like
#10

With the amount of updates that were pushed out in the month of November being so high, I look forward to hopefully seeing the same output in the month of December too!

#11

Besides your beautiful dance on that cool looking grass @coefficients. All the updates and changes that happened last month were just Amazing.
I just can’t wait to see even more updates coming. Keep up the great work. :slight_smile:

1 Like
#12

Wow! There’s a lot going on over there!
This month featured some of the best updates I’ve ever seen, way to go!

#13

November’s come to a close and now we are looking towards December. This month has been a real treat for us developers because it’s been packed with changes… unfortunately though, there are still no attributes, so I can’t call it a welcome party yet…

In terms of community-based items, I feel like it’s been relatively quiet. This month felt like a major push primarily for platform changes and tools for us developers to use to enhance our development.

Anyway! It’s time for one of my monthly retrospectives. I hope it isn’t buried too far down. Cough cough at the posts above mine and being short… :confounded: The like button exists.

Improved Plugin Management & Future Plans

I’ve always found plugin management to be a relative pain. It was often hard to navigate, unintuitive and generally unpleasant. The new window changes this to show your outdated plugins and have a nicer, modern feel to control what you enable to boost your productivity output. I especially love the separation of updated and pending updates plugins that was added in.

I’m excited to see what Roblox intends to do with the plugin feature and how they will extend management. I do know there’s already plugin purchases for one that helps us monetise our tools and I think that’s a really interesting feature to have opened up.

Improvements to Packages

From the beginning, I have been very excited for packages and I worked with them almost immediately (now where are my attributes?). I’ve never been much of a fan of LinkedSource scripts but packages have been a great help to my workflow to reduce clutter and promote reusability for all assets. I’ve even used it, at one point, for data templating.

Packages are a very powerful feature and I encourage their usage 100%. I still haven’t quite released a game yet like attributes aren’t yet enabled, but I know for a fact that I have intentions to rely on packages for my upcoming projects. I already have a few packages lying around for tests and whatnot.

Newer Terrain Brushes

I’ve never been much of a terrain artist myself, but something I do know is that I’d like to work with terrain much more. I lacked the tools to do this and often found myself programming most of the behaviours I needed for terrain, especially in regards to the water level. Being provided a native way to change the water level rids me of the need to program this myself and I can quickly modify water when it comes to a terrain map that I’m working with.

Removal of LoadLibrary

So long, unsupported and outdated library!

I don’t want to delve much into this topic since I already have a high volume of replies on the thread that you can view yourself. Other than a pretty nasty brawl, I think that this change is very much necessary and I am grateful that Roblox is sunsetting features that are actively hindering the furthering of the platform. :+1:

Beta Window Out of Beta

Goodbye, beta list! You’ll be missed. Haha insert joke about old DevForum elitism here.

I feel that allowing public access to the Beta Features window going forward is going to be a valuable experience for non-DevForum members and everyone else alike. This window provides an intuitive way for developers to flip features on in Roblox Studio and experiment around with them. I myself have been making good use of this feature, especially the Game Access Permissions feature.

When are attributes going to be added to this panel though?

Release Notes

As usual, Release Notes are packed with goodies and future prospects to look forward to. There are a few updates that stood out to me and I’d like to take a moment to recognise them.

So where are my attributes?

Release Notes 409

  • DateTime: I mean, os.time, but DateTime seems to be an object that should make working with dates and times much easier and intuitive. I’m looking forward to it’s release and being able to create features to work with this, such as daily rewards and real-time synchronisation (unnecessary but hey, who knows what you can do with that… :evil:).

  • Attributes.

Release Notes 410

  • WorldRoot: See below.

  • WorldModel: Bless Roblox for considering a way for us to NATIVELY animate, ray cast and perform other previously-blocked operations in ViewportFrames. Hacking together a ViewportFrame animator is expensive, horrible, annoying and sometimes nonfunctional. Just waiting for it to be activated now, you know, like my attributes.

  • Attributes.

And that’s a wrap for this retrospective! I decided to do things a little differently this month since there wasn’t as much links for me to go off of, but nevertheless I will not fail to post any of these monthly reviews. It’s been a fun little tack-on for me to do and I intend to continue doing these.

In the future, I might turn to writing these retrospectives based on the month as a whole and do a month-based review rather than on the recap threads themselves. I feel like this would be more information-heavy to review and I’d be able to capture a lot. :slightly_smiling_face:

Thank you to Developer Relations for the recap as always and to the engineers for making these amazing features see the light. Looking forward to a hearty December and end-of-the-year.

Cheers.

Attributes please.

7 Likes
#14

Upvoting just for this.

Can’t wait for 2020, mainly Future is Bright’s third phase though.

1 Like
#15

The high quality of the changes to Roblox in the past month were exciting to see and the future looks bright for both developers and players on Roblox. :+1:

#16

These are some of the best updates I’ve seen. Can’t wait to see more updates in 2020

#17

Can’t wait to see what 2020 has in store for us

#18

November review :clap::clap:. Great updates, from a great month. Thank you for this recap our lord and saviour.
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2 Likes
#19

This November had some very good updates! I can’t wait for the new ones coming in 2020. :slight_smile:

#20

November was pretty awesome this year but please make sure to mark in your notes that Christmas’s in December and not in November. Those updates were like gifts to all of us!

1 Like