For what it’s worth, I don’t use external tooling as a veteran developer (I much prefer having everything in one place personally). Even though it’s a cool project, Rojo users are a minority, so I don’t think Roblox should necessarily take on the extra task of interoperability with external editors.
That being said, Roblox Studio’s definitely far from perfect. It’d be nice if we got feature parity (mostly) with other editors such as VS Code. In particular, I’d love to see multi-cursor editing:
On top of that, quality-of-life changes such as precision scrolling and overscroll support would be amazing. This mostly applies to trackpads using precision drivers, but my mouse supports precise scrolling too.
Look how I can precisely and smoothly scroll through this file:
On the topic of quality-of-life changes, the text rendering could be a bit nicer too. In VS Code, my text looks smooth and clean:
Studio seems to have problems with this text, making it a bit more difficult to read for me personally:
That’s just a couple of things. Overall though, I’m perfectly content with the Studio editor already. It’s only going to get better I hope
This is a really good point. I use Rojo with VSCode (I’m not a power user by any means, just a hobbyist) and half of the benefit is working in an editor which makes scripting a much more enjoyable experience than in Studio. That consists of a lot of things, like a nice looking editor, better text rendering and more natural scrolling, smarter autocomplete, and extensions. It’s easy to discount as being superficial and not worth improving, but the experience of using the app has a large personal bearing on my own productivity. Studio has squished text and unnatural scrolling!
Luau is Roblox’s new Lua VM. They replaced regular Lua with Luau, which they made from scratch to fit Roblox better. They are optimizing the new VM, making it harder for exploiters to reverse engineer, and soon they will be adding type hints, like TypeScript!
The needs of these larger/serious teams or individuals should not be underestimated. They seek to create high quality games for a community, which I would bet, are players-first and try-Studio-maybe (and the vast majority will remain playing most of the time).
To constantly deliver good quality, devs need to make a business out of the platform, which Roblox benefits from.
Because there are fun games available, players can come and spend their time (and money) playing them.
Because there are players available, devs can come and make games for them.
It is difficult for one to be there without the other. They’re essential to each other. This is basically a multi sided business model/market.
What it’s interesting, is the ability to turn consumers into producers. Although they don’t necessarily produce at the same level.
I have read comments on youtube about games that “are so well made it doesn’t look like Roblox at all”… I think this tells a lot about what the standard for Roblox seems to be to the public, and of course, Roblox must change that.
Improving the basic tools, in general, is a good thing, it eases the introduction of newbies to the platform. But if you want to take a project and are planning to make a living out of it this is not enough.
Any serious coder will refuse to build something that is meant to be in production (or form part of the process) without proper version control. Be it git, perforce or any other vcs. There are many other tools that can make our lives easier, and Roblox should give priority to more experienced devs IMO.
The majority of people on this platform are not trying to make a living off this platform. The idea and action of making a living off of Roblox is incredibly unstable unless you have a game or service that’s constantly on the front page (or popular). For that reason alone, I’d never consider it as an option unless I was overly passionate or desperate. But, hey… that’s just me.
Whilst reading this thread and the others that have popped up since my post was authored and analyzed by you, a lot of people want Roblox to provide better for teams. I’m with that. However, it’s important to note that the success rates of teams are almost as bad as the success rate of any game. Teams take strong leadership, drive and passion to move their product (mvp, game, etc) forward. Most teams on this platform don’t see the light of day ever. Therefore, it wouldn’t make sense to launch features only because a select team deems it so. Especially when the preferred action that Roblox is willing to take will benefit the majority of developers on this platform.
In order for Roblox to expand, it needs to focus on the basics first. The basics (in cumulative) create the foundation(s) to build better support for teams. You can’t have better features if you aren’t willing to see QoL (quality of life) updates to the tools (already provided) that are in dire need.
