Place file plugins

Feature Requests Studio Features
#1

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to develop workflows for a specific place. We should be able to insert a “Plugin” instance with code into a specific place, and have it load.

If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because we could develop our workflows to a specific team.

Here are some common workflows:

  1. Plugin that previews guns for a specific game
  2. Plugin that jumps to a specific place
  3. Plugin that services economy for a specific game

People are writing their own bootstrapping plugins, or using Hoarcekat stories instead of writing real Roblox plugins. Roblox should support writing local plugins.

23 Likes
#2

I have to do an ungodly amount of boring automatable tedious tasks as part of my content churn. I’m writing these into plugins but they’re just cluttering the heck out of my plugins bar because they’re applicable to a grand total of 1 game. I don’t want game specific plugins to always be visble when I open other games.

6 Likes
#3

Every other major game engine has the ability to run code in-editor a project level (e.g. Unity, Unreal, Godot). It’s incredibly useful! Many Roblox games have bespoke setups that require specially-written plugins to manage. However, distributing these plugins is tricky:

  1. They can’t be put on the marketplace, or else anyone could get it.
  2. They must be manually installed (see above).
  3. They have to be specifically written to only activate for specific game or place IDs.
  4. Because they’re not on marketplace, they have to be manually updated.
  5. Must rely on other bootstrapping or stuff like Hoarcekat as Quenty mentioned.

Perhaps the new plugin script context could be utilized to some extent here.

4 Likes
#4

I would love this type of feature. Innovation Inc Thermal Power Plant has a custom graphical tool for defining what parts of the map can see what, and instead of making it a plugin that starts (and waste resources or requires manual updates frequently) in every game, we have the “plugin” start and stop with require(game.ServerScriptService.MyTool:Clone())() in the command bar. It is a lot more clunky than a native option.

1 Like
#5

I don’t see why you can’t just:

if game.PlaceId == 123 then
    return
end

I do this already with many plugins I’ve created (especially work in progress plugins). Never ran into an issue.

#6

That’s great, for solo development, but if I want other team members to be able use the plugins it doesn’t work as well.

1 Like
#7

Just to clarify; I’m not against this feature. I’m for all the QOL features.

I don’t see how this doesn’t work for others, too. If the custom plugin is game specific, there shouldn’t be a need to have them choose which games it’s enabled in. But, I guess a slightly better use-case would simply be workflow optimization such that specific sets of plugins are auto loaded into specific places (e.g., animation plugins for animation places, building plugins for building places).

#8

I’ve found this to work well for many of the pain-points you’ve listed:

I don’t disagree that it’d be a nice QoL update to have this feature built in to studio, but I also think this is niche enough that a plugin (such as above) is probably sufficient.