A while back I found out the ‘Mark as Start Place’ feature was removed in Roblox Studio.
Whenever you try to use the feature, it errors saying that the feature is disabled.
But why?
For me, this feature came out handy. I’m not sure what everyone else thinks, but it’s a lot more convenient than having to create a complete new game when you realize the game you currently have is not using the right start place.
Unless I’m mistaken, please consider bringing back this feature for it was much more convenient!
What do you guys think?
I personally do not see a legtimate reason as to why being able to set start places was removed.While staff did put out a statement regarding the change, I feel like it wasn’t the reason. I feel like renaming Places to “levels” would have been much more innovative and overall cause much less confusion. All removing the ability to set a start place does is prevent developers from fixing a broken Universe that doesn’t have one (as I have seen pop up numerous times in bug reports.)
Overall, this feature should be brought back as it causes more problems than good, especially since the “Mark as Start Place” button has not been removed, causing more confusion for developers. I feel like it was removed because developers were resetting their likes to dislikes, and if that was the case, it could’ve easily been remedied if Favorites, Likes, and Dislikes were combined from across all places within a universe.
My biggest issue right now is you cannot Archive, Delete, or Update games that have no Start Place.
So, these will just forever clog up “My Games” in Studio.
You do not have to create a new game. You can simply publish the contents against the root place as described in the original update announcement.
I am not sure where your doubt is coming from. The reason we removed the ability to change start places was precisely for the reasons stated – it enables us to clean up the confusion around places versus games by migrating many place-specific settings to games. If we had not made this change, we would have to spend a tremendous amount of effort writing code to help with the transition. We would rather spend that effort on features like game archiving that make your development experience better.
As for the issue where you cannot archive games without a root place, we are working on a solution.
I found that way very inconvenient nonetheless. Reason being because you’d have to re-publish to swap every place, it just gets very messy. There may even be scenarios where you don’t want to re-publish everything for various reasons.
Setting a Start Place is simply the most efficient way, and I’m just confused about why it was removed when it’s so convenient compared to what it is now.
Edit: Actually, now that I think about it: you can’t publish a start place to a start place.
That’s why it’s feeling so messy because you’d have to remove a start place to publish it to the other start place but you can’t. To me it’s so confusing I can’t even explain it properly.
As you can see, there’s no ‘Remove’ or ‘Switch’ button at the Start Place.
This means that the only way to do so is by publishing the right Place to a Place first. Then you’d have to publish again to make the Place the Starter Place. And then you need to download the old Start Place, because publishing overwrites, and re-publish it to the normal Place.
After that it’ll be complete as far as I’m concerned.
But all that could’ve been done by pressing ‘Mark as Start Place’ instead.
Just a suggestion, but perhaps renaming places to ‘Scenes’ (like engines such as Unity do) would make a bit more sense?
In that case, a ‘Game’ would consist out of ‘Scenes’.
The reason I have doubt about that being the reasoning for the change, is simply because there were other solutions to solve the problem of newer Developers (or recurring Developers) being confused about Places & Games, some of which have already been discussed in this thread. I am not sure how Roblox works internally, but I feel like renaming Places to Levels or Scenes, as @ShapeDemBricks suggested, would have been much more intuitive and still allow for the changing of start places - a feature that is still left behind in the Game Explorer since it was removed back in June, which could bring about more confusion for new developers.
Am I missing something? How are we supposed to change which place is our starting place now?
In order to do this now, I need to create a temporary place, publish A to TEMP, publish B to A, then publish TEMP to B. This seems totally unnecessary.
If I simply “Publish to” on place B and overwrite place A, Place B is still listed as Place B and Place A is still listed as Place A in the Game explorer. Place A still has the “Starting place” icon, even though Place B is now the real starting place on the website… This seems much more confusing than before the update?
There was more hoops thrown in to try and “make the experience less confusing for developers.” Even though this throws UX entirely out the window, especially when “Mark As Start Place” is still present on the website & within Studio’s game window, even after 8 or so months of this feature being turned off.
I personally do not see a legitimate reason for it’s removal.
