As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to maintain a steady workflow on update days knowing an update will probably go live and all of my studio windows will close.
In my experience studio will prompt to save if there is unsaved work but I cannot say other developers share my experience as there are claims of work being lost. Regardless of if work is being saved or not it is a nerve racking experience to have everything close down in front of you. There is no warning, there is no time to react, there might be a generic looking save window, and then everything disappears.
This is a weekly occurrence and a huge drop in productivity for anybody trying to get work done on update days. There is nothing quite as betraying as trying to open a studio window and having all of my other studio windows close for an update. Being able to work at our own leisure is hugely important and the current update process literally rips us out of our ability to do so.
There is a long standing joke among developers to avoid work on Wednesdays because youāll probably have the plug pulled on you at least once during the day. Personally Iāve become pretty accepting of this interruption and use it as a digital lunch bell of sorts. I donāt quite remember the denial or anger stages, but bargaining was a year ago.
In summary this is not a matter of work being lost (that would be a bug report, of which there have been plenty*), this is about the horrible UX problem that developers experience on a weekly basis.
If roblox where to address this problem then developers would finally be able to experience a more controlled workflow on update days. Personally speaking I would finally be able to put my paranoid ctrl+s pressing to rest.
This is very annoying, yes. Today (notably a Wednesday) I opened a test server with 2 test player clients in Studio. At that point, Studio decided to close all 4 windows for an update. When the update finished, it re-opened 3 new Studio windows as if that was good enough to fix the problem.
It seems to only happen when your current session is saved. Iāve never had a case of it closing and me losing work. But this might be different when using TeamCreate.
Regardless, this is not something you want to see in a professional game dev environment. Automatic updates that forcibly close your program? Egh.
In my workflow, I usually work in one Team Create session all day and occasionally open different place files to grab all sorts of assets from. Whenever I want to open one of these place files, or even want to start a local test session in the Team Create window that has been open for the longest, I have to eye to the lower-right corner of my screen to check whether it is that time of the week again.
Like other developers I donāt run into the issue of losing work, because the saving prompt does trigger, but it is nonetheless laughable that a game engine decides to close all open sessions without warning. Especially since there doesnāt seem to be a need to update right away; since after updating I will jump right back into Team Create in which other developers have not yet updated their Studio version.
Since forcefully updating studio versions is apparently not a requirement to maintain stable Team Create sessions, I canāt think of any reason that is worth destroying the UX for. Itās not just a āminor inconvenienceā that we have to work around when our entire workflow is built around this one program that just decided to close itself, requiring me to manually re-open every session and track down what I was working on.
Just right now I was working on porting a system to another place, and had to download an old version of this place to get some script changes. As soon as I open the file and see āStudio is shutting downā I know my workflow has been interrupted, which also affects my productivity.
That popup is super insulting when in the middle of getting something done. Sometimes it will halt the update and bring up another dialog saying I have unsaved changes in a place file that has already been closed by Studio automatically. This tells me here is already a safeguard in place to stop this, and it isnāt working correctly.
One may argue that it isnāt a big deal for lost work because Team Create automatically backs up everything. That isnāt the case all of the time, and I never know exactly what has been saved or what hasnāt. If script recovery doesnāt show up, did I lose those changes or were they already saved? I have no way of knowing that unless I spend even more time looking through the changes. My change (undo/redo) history is also not backed up for scripts I had open, so any changes I may have made that caused an issue canāt easily be reverted on.
This can all be avoided by giving us a warning before even thinking about closing every single Studio instance, which would allow us to finalize our changes and make sure things are good to go to be shutdown.
This happens to me on the daily, and itās super frustrating. Especially when Iām making changes Iām not totally set on (where I would like to keep my undo history) The undo history is lost when studio decides to force a shutdown and update. I canāt stress enough how annoying this is to deal with on a daily basis. Something needs to be done about it.
When one of our programmers experiences a studio update, they ping the rest of the team to warn us that the next place file we open will trigger a shutdown of our work environment.
We work in many places so we frequently open new studio windows. After studio closes all of your windows, you then need to remember what places you had open and manually re-open them.
5 minutes ago studio decided to reset itself without ANY prompt from me, I was doing work in adobe illustrator when suddenly my studio windows all started closing.
This x100. When I was doing a lot of terrain editing last year, the history was absolutely CRUCIAL because smooth terrain workflow is entirely destructive editing. Once that history is gone, good luck your work will NEVER look how it once did ever again.
My Studio just crashes when itās time. I hope the update process someday gets rewritten. Additionally my firewall sees each new Studio update as a separate program. Each time I must approve the new one, sometimes 2 or 3 a day. I know thereās hope because Chrome used to do the exact same things. One day after years all was fixed and it never happened again. It began updating the current files, not writing new folders for each update version.
I remember World of Warcraft used to send a server shutdown message every Tuesday before updates. Might help some of us. Probably ideal though would be a ārestart to updateā notification like browsers have.
Yupā¦a matter of hours after reading this thread, I open a new studio window to review code from another place in my game universe and all of studio shuts down on me. Totally disrupted my workflow
How do you not have a solution yet? Can you not disable automatic studio updates or make it opt in as a studio setting of some sort? Automatic updates disrupts the workflow of developers. Not even Apple does this with XCODE.
At Roblox, we always want to keep pushing forward. Supporting old versions of a product creates an immense amount of overhead & product complexity which will slow our development, and the features we deliver to you.
Roblox is complex, and my job is to embrace this complexity; take it, and make your life as easy as possible. As stated before, we know this issue exists and are looking for solutions. There is no ETA at this time, but please continue to post in this thread as the problem persists.
It makes sense to push all developers to the most recent update when it comes available. However, as different developers can already be working in the same Team Create instance with different versions of Studio, it doesnāt seem to be an issue to not have all developers update at the same exact moment.
I would be fine with an updater that ran when the first studio session of the day was opened. Or a warning that appears when the currently running Studio version is out of date and must be updated within a given timeframe. Anything that will prevent my development environment from automatically self-destructing without warning.
People are correct in saying their work doesnāt save. Studio does not prompt to save or save scripts in TC when closed for updates. I donāt know if it should be considered a bug but I noticed it happen and recovered my scripts through script recovery.
I now always save my scripts with each edit I make. (I bound Ctrl+alt+s to Apply Edits via the hotkey window in File>Advanced). Itās easy for me to simply press it when Iām about to test something or Iām done with the script. (Annoyingly if the script doesnāt have any new edits it will insert a capital S when the hotkey is pressed)
@grilme99 There are two issues, one is an issue with Team Create where we do a check that causes Studio to relaunch. 2nd, is if you play test or do anything that opens a new Studio instance it will launch and close your other windows in order to update.
@Wsly
Absolutely. Currently our TTU (time to update) is less than 24 hours. This means within a 24 hour period you could have UserA on v400 and UserB on v401, but we handle this case as gracefully as possible. There are still instances where this could cause issues.
Our immediate solution is aiming to resolve data loss and disruptions in your workflow.
After spending all morning trying to debug some of my games code I finally managed to stumble upon the information I had been looking for. I had all the information I needed sitting my my output window in my test play session. I opened up another studio window to cross reference some of what I was seeing and then poof, everything was gone.
āUpgrading Roblox Studio ā¦ā
Place file wise it was all saved so no loss there, but I havenāt been able to figure out what I did in my game to repro the bug information I had / needed. So rather than fixing the bug today Iāll be back tracking and trying to get the bug to occur again.
TL;DR I lost half a days worth of time because studio closed without warning for an update.
As the holiday season approaches most developers are kicking into overdrive to make sure their games are ready for one of the biggest times of the year. I really hope this studio updating behavior can be changed sooner than later because having to pump the breaks all day in the middle of the work week is a huge waste of time.
I also got the update your talking about. However, for me, it didnāt kick me out of Studio. I found out there was a update AFTER restarting studio, as there was a bug that I was having a issue with. It seems, therefore, its doesnāt occur for everyone and a) is random or b) targets specific computer versions/types. Thing is, Iām using a MacBook Pro, so that is probably why it didnāt automatically update. If that is the case, Windows and other operating system users should be able to update after they close Studio.
