The issue of not supporting macOS to the same degree as windows has eluded me for months now. Being a developer on this site has never been more difficult for me ever since I purchased an iMac 5 months ago.
The issues have ranged from the script editor being sluggishly unusable, studio crashes for no good reason, and now randomly not being able to view the descendants of objects in the explorer. The sluggish script editor had been fixed some time ago, but the issue has since creeped back in; with my formal complaints not being responded to by any administrative body: Script Editor sluggish after last update (MacOS).
In short, many other game development platforms support multiple operating systems quite nicely. I would therefore expect nothing less of Roblox, and hope that this may be resolved in the future.
Let’s not do this again. “Apple/Mac is inferior” is not constructive in any way and is very irritating to hear at this point. I say this in this manner because someone also said something like this just last week.
Anyway, one of the most prominent issues that I’m still seeing is that selecting Sound objects freezes the Properties window the longer it’s selected, the problem resolves itself if you close Properties but it’s still a nuisance. I already brought up this bug months ago.
I have two guesses as why Roblox Studio for MacOS has never been as up to spec as it is for Windows.
The first guess is that Roblox Studio for MacOS just isn’t being tested to the same degree as Roblox Studio for Windows. If this was the case, you wouldn’t have to deal with glaring issues such as the script editor not working properly because it would never fly by any competent QA team.
My second guess is that Roblox Studio didn’t start off with having a good library for cross platform development; instead of doing their homework, the team responsible for porting Studio jumped off into the void and started filling in the platform gaps on their own, building their own cross-platform library. This doesn’t sound that bad, but you’re going to have to consider that for every feature basically double work has to be done. Since support for MacOS probably “isn’t as important” as support for Windows because MacOS has a smaller user base, the MacOS side of things is going to get less work put into it. There most likely are software libraries out there that would allow Roblox to fix this possible problem, but it would involve uprooting the entire application, which is probably too expensive.
In any case, Roblox still has “Beta” plastered all over it in writing and to some degree the quality of the software lives up to this claim. Honestly, Roblox is in a situation where it shouldn’t be rolling out Beta-quality software on any platform.
Even if these guesses of mine are true or not, you’d be probably hard pressed to get any real answers as why you’re not getting the same level of support, which you deserve. If you get an answer, you’ll probably get a response along the lines of “our team is working very hard on these issues, please stand by”. It’s up to you if that’s acceptable. In my opinion, if a company promises support for a platform by releasing for it, it should be up to spec, no excuses.
I’m sorry if my wall of text comes across as being a bit stingy, but I think it is some deserved criticism.
According to a staff member (I’ll quote it if I can find the post) Roblox doesn’t even own any Macs in their office. I’m sure they have other means of testing MacOS for updates, but I feel that speaks volumes about how easily they’re able to test Windows versus Mac.
EDIT: Quote found and provided in subsequent reply. I myself cannot assume Roblox’s available resources (it was blatant to say that they don’t have any Macs, although I’m still not in the position to guarantee this) but this is the information I’m aware of.
I find this unlikely, although it is possible, but usually if they have any in-house video editors/designers/etc, you’ll most likely find them using a higher end Mac as they are typically “better” for stuff like that.
Other topics suggest that there are MacBooks at Roblox’s office if anything, but this is all I know. Either way, I’ve noticed that bugs differ on Apple desktops and laptops so owning one type of Mac isn’t necessarily sufficient.
I also find the support, or lack thereof, for macOS quite ridiculous and even “lousy” as you put it in this thread’s topic. There are many reasons as to why this is this case. Studio is practically unusable at times in macOS and is very unstable all the time and it’s reliability is a mixed bag full of random crashes and bugs for critical components such as the script editor and the explorer window. And considering that an update was made that supposedly fixed the script editor was somehow reversed in a later update (arguably made it worse, at least for me) adds to the absurdity. This is a very big issue and it should be a high priority on Roblox’s end considering it’s been a problem for so long and there are plenty of people who develop on macOS to warrant solid support. At the very least I’d like to hear something and/or anything from staff pertaining to this issue.
My reply from the other topic mentioned in the OP encapsulates my thoughts and details some of the issues I’ve ran into:
Mac != iMac. We have reasonable coverage for Mac hardware; the issue in question was for the latest iMac with a 4K display or something like that, which is a very specific hardware configuration. Also hardware-specific bugs are rare on Mac.
I guess the issues escalate even further with a 5k iMac, which is my case. Do you have a timeframe for when the script editor will be fixed? I can deal with all the other annoying bugs but the script editor is a necessity.
The main issue is software incompatibilities. Specifically Sierra and High Sierra. Hardware probably doesn’t have much or anything to do with it. No matter the device, if it’s running Sierra or High Sierra you probably have the issues we’ve described (laggy script editor, etc)
Yeah, macOS’s hiDPI scaling could very well also be playing a part in it. I notice that if I resize my studio window to be smaller the lagginess of the script editor is reduced. And the larger it is, and the higher my scaling is set (more towards or at the “more space” option) the worse it gets.
Are you still? At the moment with my Macbook Air with the latest version of the OS (Mojave), I can’t barely turn my camera around or it starts buffering. Explorer is slow, selecting anything takes 3 seconds to buffer, closing a tab takes ages, etc. It’s really buggy, and I haven’t been able to work properly for a couple of months now.
