The Problem
As a developer, it is currently too time consuming to open non start places from Studio. See the following video which demonstrates a 1 minute wait for opening a game, switching to the desired place, and closing the unneeded place:
https://gfycat.com/QuarrelsomeGiantIbizanhound
Time wasted:
- (0:21) Opening start place which I don’t need to edit
- (0:05) Overhead of Studio creating a new instance and authenticating again
- Up from 8 to 13 seconds when loading place from within game instead of landing
- (0:21) Closing start place so it’s not in the way
If I set the place I want to edit as the start place, it takes eight seconds to load. To get to the same end result when it’s not the start place, I was still waiting even when the one minute video finished recording. The total time was around 1:06. If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience by not needing to wait exorbitant amounts of time to work on my game.
Solutions
Opening the last opened place instead of the start place might reduce the amount of false positives, but there will still be cases where the last place doesn’t reflect the place developers need to access now. If I open a different place every day to verify player bug reports, the behavior would be just as inaccurate and a poor experience as it is now.
Roblox can improve the load/unload times for places and the overhead for creating a new Studio instance, but that time will never be 0. Even if it was, there’s still mental overhead for having to complete an unrelated task (open and close unwanted place). We’ve already recognized this was an issue with Plugins and addressed this use case by allowing them to be installed from the site. Both the time and mental overheads for opening unrelated places are equally, if not more so, awful – developers need to be able to open the exact place they want from the Studio landing page.