Problems with new Studio layout

This feedback is concerning the new Studio landing page. I am posting on a separate thread because this post would not be an appropriate reply due to its length.

New Template Page

(Solved) Tutorial icon is unclear

Some templates have a icon in the bottom right of their card. It’s not really clear what this means, but I’m guessing it’s for templates that act as tutorials. This should be made clearer.

My Games

Group dropdown placement painful

In the dropdown to select groups on the Group Games tab, the dropdown is all the way to the right. This means to access it, I have to move my mouse all the way from the left side of the screen to the right side of the screen, and then all the way from the right side of the screen to the left side of the screen. It would fit more appropriately at the left side of the screen like on the Games page. I shouldn’t have to be darting across the monitor constantly.

Group dropdown not scalable

If I have 100 groups, the dropdown is impossible to use. We should be able to get a tiled list similar to what we use for places / on profile pages.

Group dropdown shifts layout

The group dropdown shifts the list of games downwards, so they’re not aligned with the other two tabs. This means when I switch tabs I’ll probably be mousing over the wrong area because I expected the list to be somewhere else:

Games list is not scalable

If I have 1000 projects it’s going to be impossible to find an old one I want to open up with this layout. Even looking through my < 100 places to find a specific one for testing purposes, it was painful to locate. We need a search bar for the My Games, Group Games, and Shared With Me tabs. This could be placed on the same line as the group list dropdown to unify vertical offset of the games list on all tabs.

Misc

No longer able to see errors

Studio has errors. These errors are displayed in detail in the output. When I get an error like below, now I can no longer see the cause because the output is hidden. It’s possible to enable the output (RMB on toolbar and select widget), but this is extremely out of the way and I came across it by accident.

No View Tab

The View tab is a necessity for intuitively toggling widgets/etc. Easily 75% of the View tab is not related to games and is necessary behavior for the landing page. The View tab should be shown in the toolbar on the landing page. This would also make it clear how I could enable the Output.

No Plugins Tab

The assumption is that there are still the same number of steps to install plugins since they can be installed at runtime now, but this is untrue. Many times I search for plugins, I’m not doing it because I need functionality right now. It’s because someone posted a link on Discord/the developer forums, or was talking about a genre of plugins.

If I want to install a plugin for later use from one of these links, I first have to open up a dummy place to install them. There is plenty of room on the menu bar for tabs, and displaying tabs on the landing is negligible to new user experience, so the Plugin tab should be accessible in addition to the View tab on the landing.

Quick Access was removed

This is bad. I want to be able to use the buttons for opening/creating a new level file without having to open the File menu. There’s plenty of room for a QAM on the bar with the File button, so any buttons that work outside of a game should be shown here (File, Open, Close, Settings, etc)

Too wide

As shown in the above videos, on a 1080p monitor the place list is way too wide. The information overload certainly isn’t helpful to new users, and it’s a pain to navigate the game list because I’m having to move my mouse all over the screen. The game list should have a max horizontal size.

No way to access more places

Commonly I’ll be working on a game and then need assets from a past game. For instance, I already implemented a feature in a previous game so I open that one up in addition to the current one to grab a few things, copy them into the other game, and then close the second one.

This is not possible to due with the new layout because the landing disappears as soon as you open a game, preventing me from accessing it again without first closing the current game. This is bad. I should be able to quickly and easily access the landing while I’m editing a game.

Seizure switching

Switching between the landing and places is atrocious. My screen flashes violently and I see windows fighting to scale themselves. This should be much more elegant, potentially with (fast!) animations to hide the snapping.

Opening multiple places loses state

If I open a second place from a game, I now have two Studio windows open. If I close the first, original window, it goes away. When I close the second game, I’m now taken to a landing page with the default state. The state of the first window was lost when it closed, so if I was originally on the Group Game tab when I opened up the game, after I’m done I’m on the Templates page.

(Solved) Wrong default page

I create new places maybe 3% of the time I use Studio. The templates is the least useful page that could have possibly been picked to be default. It should default to Recent or My Games.

Not ready to use Games instead of Places

I know that Roblox has been pushing to consolidate the two, but sorry – they’re not ready to be consolidated. Games and Places are still an awful mess of duplicate/redundant functionality, and games are still the least valuable of the two. Game names are never reflective of the place name, and it makes it impossible to find specific places if we forget which game they’re in.

Stop trying to predict what place I want to open

Roblox always opens the start place of a game first. This means whenever I want to edit a sub-place I have to take the time to load the start place (which can be extremely painful if it’s a large place) just to get to the place I want to edit. I could have sworn it used to open to the last-edited place, but that doesn’t appear to happen anymore.

Automatically opening the last-edited place would be better, but still not ideal. It would be cute for 2 or 3 times, but then when I want to start with another place I have to repeat the process of opening a dummy place to get to the one I want. I should be able to choose which place I want to edit from the landing without having to load a dummy.

Unusable

The list of TC places was nice, but aside from that this update did not provide any functional features – the largest issue with the landing, that I needed to break workflow and go to the Develop page often, is still present. Not only was the largest issue not solved, but it was made even worse because the Develop page – which is necessary for my games – is no longer accessible from the landing.

I understand that we need to combine them, but this was executed poorly. It will only be appropriate to deprecate the Develop page when it is no longer needed. It is still majorly needed because the landing page is not capable of configuring game/place settings or uploading assets not tied to a game.

60 Likes

Yes, yes, yes and yes please. Basically all of these suggestions would really improve studio :+1:

A couple personal notes:

  • I don’t really find the width to be that bad, but I can definitely see how it would be too wide for some people’s liking and I would agree that on the “New” tab where you can make new places it does feel very empty.
  • In addition to the TC places list it would be nice to have a list of all the places that we have invited other people to edit so we can keep track of which of our own places other people have access to.

Other than that I’m in total agreement with this and would love to see these changes implemented.

7 Likes

Basically everything listed here seems to be an issue. I personally think that Roblox should have tested more before releasing the update to make sure all features are in check. It’s quite annoying how so many things got left out that most developers use.

4 Likes

The really should utilize the beta users more often, and test stuff like this on them. Rather than pushing it for everyone.

8 Likes

It seems to me like every time roblox releases updates to design, they always prioritize aesthetic rather than functionality. We end up losing a lot of useful features all in the name of a prettier UI.

4 Likes

I disagree with a longer testing phase because that would push feature releases even further back. I don’t mind if it’s lacking some features but still adds on new ones (this is a more general take), because that would make it still better than what was previously had - even though not perfect, it still is better and can be improved.

Also I agree with what @cinderdeer said about utilizing beta users more to test, but only because it would mean I get to use new features fast as possible (;3)

Thank you so much for taking the time to write out these issues! I like the looks of the new page a lot but functionality tumbles to an all-time low which is a shame. Simply changing the layout of the start page would have been enough, there’s no productivity-related reason why all the panels and the ribon should be hidden until a place is opened… probably to force users to login to use studio at all.

3 Likes

To add on to this, it is impossible to right click and “Copy Link Address” for easily pasting the link to a game you’re editing.

1 Like

This is a very small and nitpicky opinion that I’d like to add; I think it would make much more sense if the “Group Games” tab were to start out with your Primary Group selected. That doesn’t seem to be the case currently, as it always displays a group other than my primary whenever I start up studio. Again, this is a very small thing, but I believe that it would be logical, considering that most people would probably be more likely to be working on a primary group place rather than another, since, well, it’s your primary group…

3 Likes

Another big issue is the incredible lack of context menus. Right clicking anywhere does nothing. No “Open in new window”, no “Edit Place Name”, no nothing. I’d really like to see something like this.

1 Like

My main issue with this update is not showing places and instead showing games. My current team works on WIP stuff in a place under the main game (so assets uploaded sync properly) but with the new studio layout, this place isn’t shown at all thus causing confusion… I know I can’t be the only one with this type of issue either.

Perhaps an alternative would be instead of opening the start place in studio, treat the game as a folder and show all places under it including the start place so we can easily get to the place we need to work on.

5 Likes

I believe this is because they are currently listed in alphabetical order. I agree, your primary group should be shown first. That is honestly my only reason for selecting a primary group.

1 Like

The new studio layout is near enough giving me a seizure at this current time so I refuse to even touch it. I can’t say this nicely at all but I feel like whenever the term ‘streamlined’ is used it feels like someone isn’t confident in what they’re doing and slap this term on to make it nicer. I did try really hard to work with it and give it a chance but it just doesn’t work for me with the biggest issue defo being seizure invoking - hence why I’m so annoyed.

It feels the opposite of streamlined right now, it’s clunky and confusing and if I was a new dev I would certainly be out the door by now. The main points are defo addressed by OP and I hope they do get fixed asap or reverted for now because this just isn’t ready in this current state.

3 Likes

If I may add onto the list:

Drop shadow is slow

The drop shadow behind the tiles is very slow at updating. Sometimes when I hover the tiles it takes a second or even longer to appear on the one I am currently hovering. This is nothing major but is still a little annoyance when moving my mouse around the screen quickly and the shadow is lagging behind by a good second.

https://i.gyazo.com/e3ed08e01b895c7fb199ec4f0e332606.gif

Opening Files

So for opening files, we can either use the “Recent” tab if we know it was one of the most recent files we opened, or we can use the File dropdown menu. Currently there is no way directly on the new start screen to open an existing file without having to use the File dropdown menu. This is an inconvenience as it adds an extra step to the process of opening a file. While it isn’t too difficult to just go to the File dropdown menu and click open or use Ctrl+O, it would simplify the process if we could just have an “Open” button on the sidebar. This would be easier for the younger audience who might not know the keyboard shortcut for open or might be confused about where to open a place file from. (Excuse my crude implementation)

Slow Template Tile Loading

Switching between tabs on the My Games page waits until all of the tiles are loading and then switches to the desired tab’s view. This is alright, but could be better. More annoyingly though is switching between template tabs. The template tabs will switch view before loading in all of the tiles so sometimes you will open a tab and half of the tiles will be missing and just fade in after a moment or two. This is quite annoying compared to what happens on the My Games page because if I happen to flick through the templates I feel like I have to wait longer than I would just flicking through My Games even though less tiles are being loaded.

Text Crispness

On my laptop, the text in Studio does not appear too crisp and makes it a little hard to read. I do not know what the reason for this may be, but comparing it to the website, the text on the website is nice, crisp and clean while the text on the new start screen has seen some better days. It looks as if it suffered a bout of jpeg compression. Even when visiting the Roblox site through Studio(which is still possible), the text is a little more pixelated than it should be but it’s still much better than what exists on the start screen.

Start Screen:
image

Website in Studio:

Active

Whenever a game is active, a little text saying “Active” appears in the bottom right. This is definitely a necessity, but the placement of the word itself seems a little odd, especially when you look at the blank space that exists on inactive games. The blank space seems a little off. To fix this, I would suggest maybe have a triangle banner or icon in the corner of the game icon that is green if the game is active. This would feel a little cleaner and allow the tiles of Games to be the same size as the ones used on the template page and not have unnecessary white space.

image

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Recent

I’m glad that the recent section was included in this new start screen, as it was my favorite feature in the previous version. Unfortunately, that’s not without its drawbacks. The Recent section does not appear to load game icons, but instead shows a blank baseplate. As pictured above, I am able to edit Flight! and if I do so, even after restarting Studio, it appears in the recent page with the incorrect icon. This is quite irritating because if I have multiple games titled the same thing or are cut off because of the length(such as “FearMeIAmLag’s Place xx”), I cannot possibly tell which game is which without opening each one up and continuing to do so until I happen to find the one I was looking for. Additionally, I think it is unnecessary to give local files a subtitle that says so, but also give them a blank game icon. If it is a local file, why not replace the blank icon with the icon used for the file as to identify it that way? That would also allow them to be resized to the size of the tiles used on the templates page.

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I do agree with what EchoReaper stated as well, these were just other things that I noticed that I would like to see improved.

Also, please excuse how badly Gyazo showed the gifs. The gifs were merely to show my issues which were not exaggerated by my use of Gyazo whatsoever.

4 Likes