As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to feel sure my game published successfully unless I look at the Output widget.
The only feedback I get from the publishing process is in the output widget. Previously, the publish window would show you a “success” page after publishing, but that is gone now. Since publishing now happens in the background, it can be a few seconds before anything is printed, and many non-programmers are unlikely to have the Output widget open, so this process feels really uncomfortable.
There should be some kind of success indicator or progress bar within the Studio UI, or else the publish UI should not automatically exit, and it should update to show that publishing has succeeded / failed if still left open when publishing completes in the background. Changing the cursor briefly may also provide sufficient feedback if screen clutter is an issue.
This would be a very welcome UX improvement because when I publish my game it’s usually a big commitment. I don’t continue working in Studio while waiting for it to publish, and I want to make sure it worked properly without remembering to check the Output widget.
You can see in my Studio layout that I have the Output widget docked with Properties, and sometimes won’t have it visible. Today I ended up checking on the website to make sure my game published long before I saw the success message printed to output.
Down here in the corner seems like a decent place to put some kind of indicator:
As a developer publishing places does not feel secure. There are no good ways to tell if my place actually published or if it’s still in the process of publishing. The old publishing dialog would show a “progress bar” and had a “close” button when the publishing action was completed. These extra dialog pieces lead to an assured feeling that publishing actually did something. The new publishing dialog does not retain that feeling.
The video above shows me publishing my game to my test place. Clicking on the place and initiating the publish is great but as soon as I click Overwrite the dialog closes and there is nothing. I don’t know if it was successful for quite some time nor do I know if it’s even working. I have no feedback on what is a very important action.
That being said there are some studio quirks to confirm that my place has been published:
I can watch the viewport name go from “development.rbxl” to “ mk”
I can wait for a purple line of text telling me “Place1 was published successfully” to show up in the output. (xpost bug report: why does it say Place1 and not either place nor file name?)
I can check and see if the File -> Publish To Roblox options are no longer greyed out
Quirk 3 might be the only reliable one of the bunch, quirk 2 isn’t viable if I opened the place from Roblox and not from a place file, and quirk 1 is easily missed and cleared from the output. As a developer I do not like that I have to rely on other parts of studio to tell me if my place has been published.
If Roblox were to address the lack of publishing feedback it would greatly improve the sense of security developers should feel when publishing. Publishing places is a critically important action that should never have the question “Did it work?” attached to it.
+1 on this. The lack of feedback on publishing makes the experience suboptimal.
This is especially important since:
Sometimes Alt+P doesn’t actually publish (probably locked up due to some other studio task finishing up) so I’m sitting here waiting for the “Place Published!” output and it never shows up
Sometimes I publish multiple times in a row and it’s difficult to remember if I need to wait for “x2” publish or “x3” publish:
Builders don’t have output open. Thus they don’t know when their publish is complete
My solution for the time being is to methodically close and reopen the file menu until the “Publish to Roblox” text ungreys. Once it does, I’m safe to, for example, let our QA team know that a new version of the place is published and they can shut down servers and resume testing.
But the fact that I’m sitting here opening and closing this menu (for sometimes up to 60 seconds) instead of continuing development is indicative of how much this process could be improved
Recently it was changed so the publish dialog no longer automatically closes when you publish your game, and after some time it will show you a success page, which is an excellent step in the right direction! I’m very happy to see these QoL changes being made.
A very important improvement to this though would be to show a “publishing” page with a spinner after clicking the publish button, or to change the button text to something like “publishing…”, or to put a label or anything on the page somewhere to show that something is happening in the background. Currently there is no feedback after you click the button other than it going grey, which gives the impression that the window broke. Myself, and I’m sure most users, did not / would not notice this new success page because it takes a while for games to publish, and cancel ends up being the only logical next action.
This is still shockingly unpleasant in terms of UX. It’s jarring and uncomfortable. Studio should at least show a spinner here or inside of the button while it is waiting for a response.
Mar 14, 15:24 - Published successfully
Mar 14, 15:24 - Publishing failed
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