Often while I am on a train travelling across the country I often do a lot of my game development. However, while attempting to use the current iteration of studio I found it impossible to get any work done due to the lack of offline support. Understandably, certain features aren’t going to work at this stage such as CSG, but I expect there to be some basic offline support at the least.
The issue I am experiencing is that I can’t launch play solo mode when I am offline. Upon pressing the play button the game does not actually launch, the buttons become grayed out, no characters spawn and no errors are reported aside from being unable to retrieve character/image information.
I’ll also add that attempting to launch in any other mode opens a new copy of studio with a totally blank place, meaning that’s not an alternative.
As you can see the game is playing but there is no character being added making it impossible to test.
I am personally finding this a major problem and I am certain I can’t be the only one who is going to have a problem with this. Even things like just designing a working GUI or testing a camera module is impossible. I don’t personally know what the overhead for fixing it would be but currently I am relying on the original particle build of studio just to work, it’s absolutely detrimental to me.
Before anyone is going to say this :
“No, we would like to have basic Offline support, since we are also working on our games when we dont have access to a internet location. Please respect that, and dont come with the sentence ‘ROBLOX Studio isn’t meant for offline’”
For now, as a workaround, I’ve had success with Fiddler’s AutoResponder feature. Basically you run Fiddler, then do all the things you want to do offline (open studio, open place, run place, play solo, start server, etc). Then you save all of the sessions Fiddler has captured, then import them as rules into AutoResponder.
There’s something artificial stopping it from working if it can’t detect an internet connection. There have been times when my internet has gone down while Studio was open and it continued working perfectly fine (aside from spamming the output with errors). Even CSG worked, allowing me to make new unions, although if I opened other places the preexisting CSG parts couldn’t load.
We’ve made a high level decision to not support Studio in offline mode. It basically comes down to cost/benefit analysis. Keeping Studio online only makes everything much simpler, and we can spend time developing other things. The world is moving more and more online, so we don’t see the cost as that high. I know you’re going to come back with airplane type arguments, but it’s just not common enough.
Well, we can see why you guys don’t support it 100%. But could we at last have decent support to create a local server, instead of a place that simple doesn’t load ?
Speaking of offline/online, the clientsettings or whatever that Studio downloads each time it runs. Why do you guys have the livecolorpicker turned off? It seemed to work perfectly fine.
[quote] We’ve made a high level decision to not support Studio in offline mode. It basically comes down to cost/benefit analysis. Keeping Studio online only makes everything much simpler, and we can spend time developing other things. The world is moving more and more online, so we don’t see the cost as that high. I know you’re going to come back with airplane type arguments, but it’s just not common enough. [/quote]I’m really unhappy to hear this. I don’t feel as though you can say that it’s not a common enough occurrence for it to be cost effective when I do not recall myself or any other developer being consulted about this, neither the fact that none of us were aware studio is no longer supported offline.
Sure you save money and time meaning you can get updates out for us, but I can’t honestly name a single piece of software that I use day-to-day, that doesn’t have any form of offline support. Photoshop, Sony Vegas, Unity and even Steam. All of these will still work offline.
Maybe I am missing something, so perhaps you could fill me in, what is so critical that requires ROBLOX always having an internet connection? We download the client to our PC, so any important updates should be shipped with that. Client settings, why are these not cached from the previous time when studio was connected?
All I am really getting at is that I feel as though offline studio isn’t supported because of how studio was setup in the first place. There are plenty of solutions that only require you make a few changes to the program that should allow users to at least use the most up to date studio version that they last used.
Yes the world is moving more and more online, but until the day comes where you can guarantee that we can all be connected to the internet even 90% of the time then that statement is fairly redundant. I apologize if this has come across as hostile in any way at all, but I think the general consensus here is that offline studio is something we want.
Being honest my Internet goes off at certain intervals because of the account holders powers when using BT internet. So this is quite important for me as when the internet goes off I usually get caught off guard and am unable to carry on without being able to test it with a player. I also travel a lot to visit family and stuff. I would really like to be able to test player and have other online features when offline
The one thing that would be good to have is have the client settings be store, and if HTTP fails, load the latest settings, weather it is an update ahead due to a revert or 50 versions behind. If we crash in places without wi-fi, and we have things like SurfaceLights or Folders, or even plugins with them, they will cause issues with the client settings being like 80 releases behind.
Not supporting offline mode just because devs don’t use it offline often is ridiculous, and the argument of “everything is moving more and more to being online” is a load of smoke. You can stop supporting offline mode when not having a connection is near impossible. Studio is a tool that devs use to make what’s on their mind and having it only work with a constant connection is preposterous and counter-intuitive.
Imagine if tools such as Photoshop and 3dsmax only worked when you have an internet connection, seems stupid doesn’t it?
I can confirm that this is a problem, I often do a lot of travel on buses which leads to lots of waiting between transfers. I almost always have my laptop out at these times and no internet connection. Right now all I can do is write down ideas I’ll never get the time to make because I don’t have the time to create existing ideas because that time is spent reading books or writing more ideas.
I’d like to bring this back up to the surface. At present, I am rendered unable to connect to the internet due to an issue with my internet provider. We’re not currently sure when our connection will resume. Although this isn’t a usual occurrence it’s causing me to delay progress on my game. I’d very much like to see this discussed in more detail. There are no reasons for not supplying a piece of software that works offline, especially when it seems to be an industry standard, even if certain features are unavailable (CSG in ROBLOX’s case.)
