This post is light on details but big in meaning. Behind the scenes we are doing a lot of work (like, really a lot) on the Script Editor. Over the course of the year, this will equate to a faster editor with better syntax highlighting, more accurate autocomplete, and native support for Luau.
Today we are releasing the first batch of changes to the Script Editor. These are mostly bug fixes for code folding and block enders. You shouldn’t notice much of a difference but we wanted to let you know we are making changes. Please report any strange behavior in the #platform-feedback category as it might be a bug!
Future releases will include bigger upgrades, accompanied by more detailed posts.
8th wonder of the world includes posts that are updates to the script editor.
This update sounds good! The ROBLOX Studio Script Editor is a large part of my workflow. I use it any time I use ROBLOX studio. Sometimes weird bugs make me want to switch to Visual Studio, but if more syntax fixing / performance updates are going to be added I likely will never have to do that again!
Will there every be an update to fix heavily obfuscated code severely tanking ROBLOX studio’s FPS?
I like to go through rather “suspicious” and potentially malicious models that are “botted” to the front page; however it makes it hard when the script editor can not handle the script source at all though. Sometimes I’ll open a script and my entire studio just crashes.
It’s really cool to see Roblox focusing on Quality of Life updates over just adding more features. I love more features just as everyone else, but I do spend quite a bit of time in the scripting window. Even if I don’t know fully what’s coming, I can’t wait. The easier it is to script, the faster I can make great games. Thank you to the team working on this.
As a power user, I wish Roblox would focus its efforts more on embracing the world of software that already exists rather than making Roblox Brand Everything. I am a Systems Engineer working a the studio behind Adopt Me, and we use Rojo for building our game which allows us to use tools that are standard in the industry like VSCode and Git with GitHub. It’s a vastly improved experience for a team of our size (25 people) than anything that Roblox currently provides.
Here’s the thing though: I don’t want Roblox to provide better tools. Roblox is a company with finite resources. You simply cannot compete with the existing tools that hundreds of thousands of developers use every day. Instead, I implore you to reconsider this vision for your product and stop ignoring your power users. Embrace the wide world of software. Make Studio a place where power users can have a great workflow and new users can have a great introduction to game development.
I wholeheartedly disagree with Roblox’s recent track record of trying to reinvent the wheel on every front. You don’t have the engineering capacity to do this, and this ends up making the experience for people who actually need these tools worse.
There’s a lot you can do right now to allow supporting these external tools that you aren’t doing. Unfortunately, the plugin API just simply does not exist to make the bridges to these third party tools happen.
Roblox Studio works best when it’s the final tool on the toolbelt that pulls all of the game’s resources together. When you try to make Roblox Studio the ONLY tool on the toolbelt, the experience for power users is severely crippled. Please reconsider your course of action.
I’ve always found some parts of the script editor’s autocorrect to be a little wonkly, so I’m hoping this will fix some of that.
Definitely will be making sure I keep track of these updates as they come out, they are definitely going to go well with all the other updates being added to studio right now.
I’ve always found the autocomplete a little flawed since objects that are nested deep within the parent-child hierarchy do not get autocompletion for properties and functions. Hopefully, it’s going to get fixed now.
I don’t know what code folding refers to, but I do know that block ending did have a little issue. For functions, the beginning part (near :Connect(function()) was a little awkward to type out because of the autocomplete for parentheses, which always added an extra one. Hopefully, this also gets fixed.
We truly appreciate your effort!
I am loving these “convenience” updates that focus on the developer workflow. Keep it up Roblox!
Hopefully “native support for Luau” in the editor includes something like this:
Without advanced insights like these, suggestions, and other code analysis and navigation tools, Luau types will end up being more of a nuisance than benefit.
I agree to an extent, I believe the time and resources they spend on re-inventing the wheel could be better spent elevating the platform in other ways to bring it closer to the industry and remove some of the restrictions/limitations it has.
On the other hand, I think a big reason why they do this is so brand new developers or kids learning how to code don’t have to jump through all these other hoops just to get something up and running.
I’m all for re-inventing the wheel and attaching roblox-brand stuff to things if it helps new developers grow and learn game creation concepts, it’ll ease their transition to other more professional tools.
It doesn’t make much sense from us from a professional/experienced developer’s perspective, but if you’re 11 years old and want to learn how to make a brick change color, it’s nicer to be able to just insert a script and use the editor rather than find the rojo plugin, install it, set up VSCode, etc…
This applies to other areas as well. Are unions almost always stupid? Probably. Is blender better? Yes. Does every brand new developer want to learn a ton of different software when they’re just starting out? Probably not.
Roblox can be a professional game development tool, but it’s also always been an innovative medium to get younger people into game development in a less daunting way.
(Also, this doesn’t mean I’m disagreeing with you about how they need to start adding better support for third party tools - I just believe it’s more fitting if they do both )
This is true, but you have to remember that not everyone is a power user in the sense that they are not interested in using VSCode and Git with GitHub. Although implementing native support for external editors would be great, having everything you need to create a game in one place (Roblox Studio) is good for beginner and intermediate developers simply because it does not require you to download extra software and do extra work to get started.
That being said, it makes sense why they are prioritizing the advancement of their built in editor and other features that Roblox Studio provides instead of taking away their limited engineering power from the majority and putting it on the minority.
I am an animator, so although I don’t work with scripts much, I do need to sometimes. I am also trying to learn more about scripts and might start making games soon. This sounds pretty good and I hope it’s helpful.
And what about the people who are just starting out on Roblox and don’t want to have to figure out multiple things to make a game? What if they just want to use Roblox studio to keep it all in one place?
You could just as easily go and create games with Unity or Unreal Engine if you want to get good usage as a power user.
I’m a computer science major who has been programming since I was 9. Roblox Studio works perfectly fine for me and many other users.
I do agree however that Roblox could do with a little sprucing up and make it more easily accessible to use third part software for development, but to the majority of the people on Roblox. They’re just starting out, don’t know what they’re doing, or don’t know how to use other tools, and may not want to learn them.
I noticed a few days ago that when I open a script, it opens from the last line. It’s kinda hard to deal with because all my variables are at the top and I have to scroll 600 lines at a time to add a new one; is there any way to make it open at the top?
Is there really anything Roblox could do that Rojo currently technically cannot? I don’t see why native support for external editors would be worth the time investment, when Rojo is a perfectly capable solution to this issue.
Luau refers to the umbrella initiative that includes the new parser, linter, compiler, VM, type checker, and maybe more!
For example, one issue we’ve been running into is that the old editor has its own ideas about how to do syntax highlighting. As we extend the language with types, context keywords like continue, new number literal format, etc., this means the highlighting starts to diverge - this update (IIRC) starts using Luau lexer to do highlighting, which is better than what we used to do, but worse than what we can do in the future.
