As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to iterate efficiently in Team Create because Studio re-downloads all game assets every time I open a place, instead of caching them locally. Our game’s place file has grown to 17 MB, and loading all of the assets, including meshes, textures, and other content, can take several minutes. This significantly disrupts workflow, as even running a simple playtest after restarting Studio can take over 10 minutes. During this time, core features like DataStores also don’t work until everything is fully loaded.
I’m located in Germany, where internet speeds still lag behind global standards. I have around 20 Mbit/s down (≈2 MB/s) and 6 Mbit/s up (≈0.75 MB/s). In contrast, I have a fast M.2 SSD (Samsung 990 EVO Pro) with over 1.67 TB of free space and read speeds in the GB/s range. Yet Roblox Studio seems to ignore this potential, assets are not reused or cached across sessions, even on the same machine.
If this issue is addressed, it would improve my development experience because I could:
- Launch places and test features much faster by avoiding repetitive downloads (~50–100x faster).
- Save considerable time in daily iteration, especially in Team Create environments with large game files.
- Work without disruption during brief connection drops, or even continue working offline in some cases if assets are cached.
- Leverage local SSD performance, which is ~3,000x faster than my current internet connection.
- Potentially enable future version control features by performing lightweight, bulk-diff comparisons to detect changes across cached assets.
Use cases:
- In Team Create, I frequently switch between places and sessions. Every switch causes a full re-download of assets that haven’t changed, introducing delays that add up quickly.
- Internal playtesting often requires restarting Studio. Without asset caching, each session has significant overhead before I can test even small changes.
- Even with a stable Ethernet connection, slow broadband throttles development speed unnecessarily when assets could be loaded from disk.
- My machine is well-equipped with storage and hardware, but Studio fails to take advantage of it, making development feel far slower than it should.
- If assets were cached, it could enable faster change detection or bulk verification for a future version control system, instead of relying on always-online syncing.
I understand that storage management is important. A good compromise might be to detect when there’s sufficient free disk space (e.g., 10 GB or more) and enable aggressive asset caching automatically, with an option in settings to disable this behavior for users who prefer minimal disk usage.
