Studio needs lots of work. The experience of working with a large scale project on Roblox is awful.
On Pet Simulator 99 we use Team Create. We all build & program under the same place. Here are the most glaring issues I can come up with that make our day to day difficult:
My intent here is not to describe any bugs in intricate detail – I’m sure many of these have been reported – but to convey how difficult it is to work on a large game due to the poor state of Studio. Please help us.
Trying to group large amounts of parts/models into a model/folder causes extreme lag, crashes, and often full blown corruption. It often creates empty models, places parts randomly amongst workspace, deletes module scripts, etc, requiring a rollback to a previous version #.
Searching in explorer often breaks it, requiring a restart. The loading wheel goes forever and nothing shows up in the explorer.
Clicking on Workspace causes extreme lag (the entire window literally freezes for 30+ seconds) because it tries to draw selection boxes on the entire world.
Trying to alt-drag to select parts causes extreme lag, often causing crashes.
Typechecking/autocomplete often stops working entirely.
Version history menu doesn’t let me easily jump backwards in time. We have 22,000 versions of Pet Sim 99. I’d have to scroll for hours to get back to a version from over a month ago.
Overall performance decay with Studio throughout the day. I restart my Studio about once an hour when I’m consistently running Play Solo. My framerate gets worse and worse over time until I restart. Definitely some memory leaks there.
Printing in the output is super laggy, especially when the same value is printed over and over.
Properties often duplicate in the properties window, forcing me to restart.
Studio doesn’t gracefully exit. I’ve trained myself to ctrl+alt+del force quit the program. Pressing X takes 30-60 seconds to close the window. We don’t have anything weird bound to game.OnClose.
Client scripts often don’t execute after pressing Play Solo for about 30-60 seconds. It seems the entire client sometimes hangs on waiting for the local player’s clothing assets, and won’t execute anything until all clothing is loaded in. On some days I hit play, twiddle my thumbs for up to a minute, then perform my tests once the client scripts actually load.
Edit:
13. Drafts sometimes overwrite each other. Just a few minutes ago a coworker and I were working on the same module script. I committed, he did not receive my commit, about 10 minutes later he committed his version (no merge prompt) and overwrote all of my code. We ran into the same issue again and noticed we were operating on different versions, he discarded his draft (again, there was no indication he was out of sync with the committed version) and my code came in. This has happened to us a handful of times over the past couple months, and we’ve accidentally pushed improper values to production because drafts don’t work like they’re supposed to.
Edit:
14. Reparenting large folders consistently crashes Studio (i.e moving a folder from inside of a model into Workspace.) Then, when I boot studio back up, parts are corrupted. There are empty models inside of the folder, parts spread all over the folder as direct children instead of inside of their original model, and I think even things missing. Hard to explain but devastating. The folder makes it to workspace, but the hierarchy is ruined:
Another example of (14):
The Lock part was inside of the IslandPortal model, now it’s gone and a direct child of the moved folder…
It’s not consistent either. Some are missing the billboard, some are missing the root part, some are missing the lock:
These issues have been prevalent in Studio for so long. I have worked as a small developer for bigger games and experienced this. I also have multiple friends that experience the same things(developers on GPO, AOPG, Bitzai, etc.). Its insane how Roblox hasn’t tweaked studio to adapt to larger games.
These most likely won’t be fixed in the short term; when the new completely rewritten interface comes out these problems regarding the studio interface will most likely be solved. The explorer is one of the big issues when it comes to selection performance, and it will be entirely rewritten during the new Studio interface revamp. I believe it is most likely coming out in June.
CC: @MeshOfPaul, double checking that my information is correct!
Explorer is indeed getting an overhaul this year but it’s a separate effort/team than the June UI Beta we are working on. But yes the new Studio architecture we’ve built to support the Next Gen UI does greatly reduce the possibilities of hangs for long running or intensive tasks. Team Create is also a different team and they are working on multiple improvements for larger teams/projects. Performance is a big priority for all of our teams this year.
hey David - Stef here from Studio. Thank you for the well organized list of issues. These performance/hang issues are the main focus of 2024 for us and we are actively tackling most of them presently. It would be super useful if you could share any copy of a “large” placefile (over DM) that we can add to our test set to make sure the scalability/stability/perf issues we solve do actually alleviate your concerns. Thank you.
Stef
Hi everyone, thanks for the responses. Sorry about the crass nature of this post – I was a bit frustrated yesterday . Glad to hear performance is a focus.
As for a copy of the place – I believe we will be sending that via our Discord. Thanks.
On extremely large places (100 MB+) you don’t even get to load. At times, Studio instantly boots you with a disconnect error the moment you connect to the server. Autosaves disconnect you as well
I’ve been experiencing similar loading performance problems with a bigger game I’m currently working on. I have to sit for minutes waiting for the game to load fully. Which is costing us valuable time that could have been spent working on features or fixing bugs.
The reasons you listed are just part of why professional game studios (even partnered ones that work on brand games, such as Walmart or Netflix) don’t use Roblox Studio’s features, instead they use GitHub and Visual Studio Code.
Honestly though your better off using proper tooling like GitHub and Visual Studio Code then using Roblox Studio’s native features, which is not always a option in a team environment. Roblox needs to change and adapt to support bigger workflows, and still the draft system is practically unusable.
I’ve been going through and rooting out all of the selection related performance issues that have built up in the last couple of years. A bunch of fixes for these are now lined up for next week’s release, and you should see a significant boost in how large of a selection Studio is able to smoothly handle once the changes are enabled.
This should solve the issues with grouping / ungrouping / alt-drag / clicking workspace / etc which were all really related to selection performance under the hood. TL;DR: They’re things which cause the large selection changes, and various pieces of downstream code were added which respond to selection changes without paying enough attention to how they would handle a large selection change.
We’re also going to put additional tests in place to prevent selection performance from regressing again.
(there’s work in progress on other parts of the feedback too, just updating you on the part of this that I’ve worked on)
[Update from Studio team]
Hi everyone, I’ll keep this thread updated as we make progress on the reported issues in this post. We’ve created a task force inside the Studio team to tackle the issues related to working in large teams and places, and we’re actively investigating all the issues above.
We have the first set of improvements launching by end of this week - as @tnavarts mentioned above, we’ve made some significant improvements to selection-related performance. We expect the improvements to resolve or improve issue #1, #4, #5 above. Please give this a try next week!
We are working on fixes for #2, #3, #6, and investigating potential solutions for the rest.
. Glad to hear performance is a focus.