Reproduction Steps
Whenever you try to save a file to your PC with a different name, the publish place to roblox window opens up instead.
Expected Behavior
I expected the file explorer to open up
Actual Behavior
The window where i can publish the place onto roblox opened up instead
Issue Area: Studio
Issue Type: Other
Impact: Very High
Frequency: Constantly
Date First Experienced: 2021-09-24 00:09:00 (+02:00)
Hello,
This is part of the “New Games in the Cloud” beta feature that we recently turned on that changes the Save UI a bit.
Saving multiple local copies as different files is a use-case we didn’t consider enough, I’ll bring this up with the team and see what we can do to make that workflow smoother when this beta feature is turned on. I absolutely agree that the way we have it set up now doesn’t support your workflow very well.
In the mean time, your options for a workaround are:
Thank GOD someone already posted this! I am so furious at this, considering the workaround of “Download Copy” literally doesn’t even function half the time, greying itself out at random.
This is unbelievably destructive to any solo dev who prefers to work with local copies. That includes myself - Studio has officially become extremely frustrating in the blink of an eye.
There should be no workarounds required. When I hit Ctrl+S, I expect it to directly save to the file in which I opened. Please tell me this will always be supported going forward, and this will always be a feature I can turn off?
This is genuinely repulsive to turn my ctrl+s hotkey into a forced cloud save, leaving me to fiddle around with menus and use “Save As” rather than just “Save”. A complete breakdown of my typical workflow.
Imagine the wifi goes down or you want to code a bit on an airplane where there’s no wifi, how would you save changes if everything is ported over to the cloud?
If theres no wifi then there would be no way to save your changes to your own files.
It would become impossible to make any progress in studio offline.
Normally when i take trips in an airplane, i work in offline mode myself.
You already can’t work very well offline, Roblox is NOTORIOUS for virtually non-existent studio support. Surprising you can get it to run at all.
That being said, you CAN still save - You just need to Save As or Download Copy. Which means goodbye save hotkey, goodbye one-click saving - It’s literally Studio forcing you to go the slow route to save just so it can shove cloud saving down your throat.
so ugh. I hate it when the removal of basic features happens in favor of “new” things.
This is basically Roblox’s equivalent to Apple removing the headphone jack - Nobody wanted that, and people hate it to this day. Don’t make it less convenient to save, for the love of god, Roblox.
Quick further question on this - Does the “Save” saving to roblox SAVE or PUBLISH it? The main reason I work offline is because I can barely tell the difference between the “Save to Roblox” and “Publish to roblox” button anyways, so for safety and not accidentally uploading half-made updates I simply always save offline. (Like if I “Save to Roblox” then hit the Edit button on the game page… is that the published or saved version I’m getting??)
Really, this is definitely the most incompetent update roblox is trying to push in a while - And the lack of feedback we’re currently getting on it is terrifying, given the thought that the option to turn this off might be disabled when this save change becomes finished.
Another use case here, if roblox REALLY needs it: I upload a lot of my initial prototypes to a “Test” server, as a majority of my, and really, any game developers projects often don’t get past the first rough draft. This means that, should I upload a LOCAL SAVE to this testing place, and don’t manually download a copy, I now run the extreme risk of later uploading a separate place to that same test area and erasing the past game. Which I then have to desperately fondle through the version history of to get back.
Repeat it with me, ROBLOX staff:
Saving 
IS NOT
Uploading
One more time, for the coders in the back!
If Save == Upload then
print(‘Roblox has messed up.’)
end
Where when you play a place, you will join the most recent version marked as “Published”.
TL;DR:
Why dont you call it ‘save to place’ and ‘publish to place’ and add an additional ‘save to file’ option instead?
or call it ‘save to cloud’ , ‘publish to game’ and an additional ‘save to file’ button if it causes confusion.
Sorry for the late reply, but I never saw this reply and I just find it so funny…
That is basically what it was. Literally, disabling this stupid update reverts it back to practically that. There was genuinely nothing wrong with the previous setup, which had every save option listed in it’s natural habitat, doing what you’d EXPECT them to.
Every day I wait for this update to come out of beta and ruin my local-save-based development. and then I see roblox outages like the one that is currently going, and how studio won’t even start because roblox is down…
Just ugh. It is so obvious that studio needs to be tied less to constant connection to roblox, as it literally stops operating the second roblox has even the slightest hiccup.
How can roblox compete with any real game engine when it’s forced always online? And this just makes it worse.
As technology advances, software is becoming more and more reliant on the internet, as we should expect. I actually support the cloud save function for a few reasons. It’s easier to work on a team when a project is always saved online. It’s also (arguably) safer from possible corruption or deletion. There isn’t really anything wrong with introducing a new system as long as it works and benefits the users.
I will, however, admit that I believe it’s strictly necessary to keep offline saving as a quick option. Working in Roblox Studio offline should always be an available option and there should not be any easily avoidable punishments for creators working offline, especially since they sometimes have no choice. Updating shortcuts to execute entirely different functions should not be a consideration.
‘Ctrl + S’ should always save to file, just like ‘Alt + P’ has always published to Roblox. As everyone knows, there are buttons like Alt and Shift that can be added to shortcuts in order for hotkeys to perform similar but not identical actions. I am sure there are hotkeys similar to ‘Ctrl + Shift + S’ or ‘Alt + S’ that could have been used for cloud saving instead.
If new features are introduced in a game engine, I think the new features should come with new hotkey shortcuts rather than overriding existing shortcuts. Cloud saving and file saving are entirely different, even if they are both methods of saving. I doubt the software engineers would ever permanently restrict creators from saving to file, but access to the feature should not be restricted in any way.
Very well put. I’m really not sure why Roblox went the route that it did in this instance. It feels like there are definitely better ways than just removing regular ctrl+s functionality like that.
I remember working in roblox studio while being on an airplane without wifi, it was amazing and allowed me to make some progress of my projects, even though some features were disabled.
Now that this outage is happening i realized roblox has taken the offline feature out of studio, i find that insane because not everyone has a stable connection at all times like the roblox HQ does.
There needs to be a backup plan for situations where the site goes down or your own wifi goes down that allows you to just continue working on some stuff in offline mode. You cant imagine a world where everything will always work, just like the site thats been down for almost 3 days as of now.
Thanks ive been trying to figure out how to save my game for a few days
This blight of an update is unfortunately back. Guessing that “New games in the cloud” Beta is no longer beta, meaning you have completely broken functionality for someone who does not wish to have an always-cloud-uploaded workflow.
Not everyone wanted this. This thread proved that. Now this - What should definitely be considered a Bug is back.
I often upload places to a “testing” place - a public open pre-release place where I put things I need testing but can’t work into the main game. Sometimes I use it to publish silly little experiments and tech demos that I made - and saved locally - due to them not really being meant for full release.
This, and I do not use the word lightly, blight of an issue means that any tech demo I wish to upload to my temporary place now needs to either be cloud-saved to it’s own individual place (waste of my time and effort, would create hundreds of new places unnecessarily), or just exit out of the cloud save and re-enter the regular save every time I am forced into my save button being removed from publishing.
This needs to be fixed. This is not acceptable.
“Download a copy” is basically a downgraded version of “Save to file”. It is “save to file” with a big insult on top of it that forces you to re-input what you’re saving it as. All it is, is roblox forgetting what you’re trying to save for the sake of forcing cloud-only in a very obnoxious, useless way.
Sadly now it seems there is no way to download a local copy. It only says Save to roblox, Save as to roblox, and publish. Download a copy is never available. And the instructions at Roblox.com are outdated (https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/203313900-How-to-Copy-an-Experience)
What if you are a developer and lose access your account? Having a local copy is extremely important.
Roblox should be developing a few games themselves. That way they understand what developers need. Then they would be like the awesome dev team at Blender. They make a film or two every now and then to know what features to develop and what direction to go.
Is this in A/B testing or something?!
I can still download.
A hacky workaround to have a local backup of a game would be putting the games ID into https://assetdelivery.roblox.com/v1/asset/?id=GAMEID to get an rbxl of it which can then be opened in studio. (This will only work if you’re logged in on an account which has edit permissions of the game, otherwise it will say you don’t have permission)
Why is this a thing, what is so bad about having a local backup of our games?
Thank you so much. I will try this. I was opening two roblox studios and getting into this glitch where it said I was disconnected which allowed me to open a local copy… Only then was it allowing me to save as onto my computer.
It is really important to have a local copy because you’re developing a TON of content. And you’re trusting that Roblox isn’t going to make a mistake or ban you for the wrong reason. Just the other day my little brother got banned on Roblox because somebody (not gonna point fingers XD) accidentally disputed some credit card charges.
My little bro has spent a lot on robux and has a lot of time invested in games. Roblox makes mistakes. They make policy mistakes. The more power and responsibilities developers retain, the more shielded they will be from Roblox sided mistakes. What if you get hacked? And what if the hacker gets you banned? There’s just too many what ifs to put hundreds or thousands of hours worth of work at risk.
It’s not just Roblox. This is a recurring theme with big platforms. Like youtube, amazon, and etc. Imagine if you made video content on youtube, and all the data you were using had to be uploaded, processed and etc on the youtube platform. You became a prisoner of youtube. Now any mistake youtube might make takes your data hostage.
Just the other day blender guru (the awesome blender tutorial guy) was hacked. All his videos went down. Imagine if all that content was only on youtube and it got deleted. That’s thousands of hours of work gone. Forever. (Thankfully he got his account back and content restored. But that might not always be the case. Local data is a must. And it’s no surprise that people like photographers keep local data on MULTIPLE hard drives in RAID setup or whatever… That’s to make sure that absolutely no freak accident is going to delete all their hard work.)