Introducing Asynchronous Publishing for Places (Non-Team Create)

What’s Fresh?

Today, we enabled Asynchronous Publishing for Non-Team Create Places in Studio. The main purpose of this feature is to enable you to continue to work on your creation while we publish/save in the background. Our goal is to take this initial step in improving your productivity as you continue to make larger games on the platform.

We hope you you enjoy the video below.

We hope you think that is as awesome as we do. Please keep in mind, the improvement you see will vary depending on the size and contents of your place.

Nitty Gritty. Don’t Forget Me.

Old Workflow:
As a developer, you have been making the most incredible update on the planet. Now, you are ready to publish your changes to the big wide world. You hit Publish to Roblox, and now we lock your DataModel preventing you from doing anything until the operation is complete. Once complete, you may go about your day.

New Workflow:
As a developer, you have been making the most incredible update the world has ever seen. Now, you are ready to publish your changes to the big wide world. You hit Publish to Roblox, and now you try to exit Studio. We pop up a dialog telling you we are currently in the middle of publishing/saving and will close automatically when it’s complete.

This new behavior means that we are assuming that you were going to leave that Studio session and move onto other things. This means that if all goes as planned and the Publish/Save is completed successfully, your Studio session will be automatically close. Please keep in mind that if you make any changes after this dialog, the session will close and that work will be lost.

Q: What happens if my place fails to publish/save in this case?
We will show you an additional dialog to inform you that the publish/save failed. We did this to ensure you are made aware and no data was lost. We will not automatically close your Studio session in this case. Please keep in mind that this is the only case in which we will show a dialog for place failure.

Fluff.

As we move forward into 2020, we are looking towards enabling this for Team Create, and doing additional work on removing blocking calls in Studio. Additionally, we are looking towards UX improvements in order to improve the overall experience of asynchronous calls in Studio.

None of this would have been possible without the incredible work of @Regal_Corgi!

Don’t get out of your seat for an applause yet. There’s more gifts to come!

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Team Create places already appear to work in this way. What would be changing should this feature come to them?

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This is just expanding the functionality (which was previously limited to team create) to not-team-create.

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How do I turn this off? A lot of times I work on places specifically with the intention not to save changes.

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If you read thoroughly through the announcement post, you will see that this feature is not available in Team Creates instances:

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Very nice change, sometimes windows would automatically shut down studio when I was trying to publish, this is a much appreciated change on my part, as I was just enabling team create in all of my places so that my computer wouldn’t have to handle the upload.

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This isn’t auto-publish, this just means that when you publish, studio doesn’t freeze.

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I’m in a place in studio right now, and it’s “Saving to Roblox” every 5 minutes, on top of saving an auto recovery file.

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That is different. This update pertains to publishing. Saving to Roblox means your place is being saved to the cloud, akin to saving your work on your local filesystem. Auto save does not publish your updates. A game you work on does not have it’s changes shown in live games until you explicitly publish.

Saving is just saving. Publish is to put your latest version to production, having the published version show in live games. You definitely have the intention to save changes when working on games.

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I like it and all, but why does it not have the same “Sent message to server to publish…” message as Team Create? It can get a little unsettling when you don’t know if the publish request went through, specially for big maps.

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Thank you, I know what Saving to Roblox is and it’s specifically what I don’t want happening. This is the first time Roblox Studio has been automatically Saving to Roblox for me.

How do I turn this off lol

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I actually hate that image but its so funny at the same time.

Assuming I’m understanding correctly I think that it would be good to be able to turn off the auto saving to cloud that @nick_hz is encountering. I often times keep utilities in one place so I can open the place as a template, run my utility code, and publish it somewhere else or not at all. It’s gonna be a huge pain if I have to cleanup my utility places after I use them.

Also I think it would be good to publish places in the background (e.g. show the dialogue but hide the main studio window and show again it if an error occurs). I like to close studio immediately after I publish sometimes and not having an option to hide studio is kind of annoying. I think I’d also like to be able to disable the dialogue if I know that studio will finish publishing anyway.

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This feature is fantastic! But I’m also assuming this is why the “Publish Whole Game” feature was removed. Any chance we’ll get a substitute for mass updating packages?

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With the addition of Asynchronous Publishing we added a feature where we auto-saved to the cloud automatically for non-team create places. We realize this is creating pain for your workflow and we do not provide the tools for you to easily rollback your changes with versioning.

You may turn this feature off temporarily by disabling Auto-Recovery in File > Settings > Auto-Recovery. We will be disabling this change completely next week until we provide better tooling around versioning.

9 Likes

To clarify

This means that if all goes as planned and the Publish/Save is completed successfully, your Studio session will be automatically close

Does that mean that everytime you hit publish to, studio will close?

No. Only if you publish, and then try to close.

This is really cool, no longer will have to stress if I saved my progress or not when I close studio :joy: