Deployment servers, such as https://setup.rbxcdn.com/, serve downloads of the Roblox client, Studio, and various assets. Historically, the server produced files for builds going all the way back to 2009.
Recently (possibly coinciding with this error), builds produced before 2020-02-12 have been made unavailable. I want to confirm whether this is an error, or whether old builds have been purged intentionally.
Among other things, I use these old versions to build a database of changes made to the Roblox Lua API to, for example, display updates. Files are cached as needed, but rebuilding the database from scratch reliably is not possible without these old versions being available.
This is a major problem for me as well. I can’t dynamically diff against previous builds of Roblox Studio unless I had the files for those builds in the first place. I can understand why they don’t feel the need to pay for the heaps of deployed files they aren’t even officially distributing anymore, but this is a huge loss of archived data.
The folks over at the client search discord server are trying to piece together what builds we still have in our possession, but it seems a lot of it has been lost.
Please let me know what files/versions and you need the previous builds and I can see if we can restore those if missing.Do you only need API dumps available, if so then we can keep those forever as well.
We do plant to keep wiping out old build and we can keep 3 month max old binaries always available.
Where $HASH is the version hash (e.g. version-0123456789abcdef). All such hashes are listed in the DeployHistory.txt file. The presence of these files depends on the build type, so not every combination of hash and filename necessarily exists.
Ideally, I’d like a chance to download absolutely everything, but I understand if that’s infeasible.
This might be a lot to ask, but could everything on production be restored for at least a month so those of us in this niche crowd of client archiving can have time to collect the files we want to keep? We didn’t have any advance notice these files were going to be removed.
An idea I have in mind right now is to partition all unique build files into a GitHub repository where each version is stored as an iterative commit for anyone seeking specific versions of the client.
If it would be easier to upload, this could be limited to just the zip files that actually have changes between versions (i.e. Each file with a unique MD5 hash, rather than duplicates)
Additionally there’s still an existing archive of builds on the S3 buckets for gametest1-gametest5 that go back to late 2017, so builds later than that may not need to be restored onto production.
Would we be able to get a temporary access of the binaries for all of Roblox’s history so we can archive these binaries and API dumps in question? I think preserving this sort of thing is really valuable for the community.
As mentioned before, RobloxApp.zip and RobloxStudio.zip would also be needed, as these have the ReflectionMetadata.xml file, which contains additional metadata about the API.
Sorry for the bump, this has not been fixed unfortunately, downloading previous versions before 02/2020 still returns access denied, currently need SSL files from 2019/2018 and maybe The robloxplayerbeta.exe