The questions and answers from the January 2024 Creator AMA
Roblox's CTO answers questions regarding developer income, engine improvements and future features
Recently, Daniel Sturman, the Chief Technology Officer at Roblox along with other Roblox staff members hosted an Ask Me Anything session on the Developer Forums. Here is a compilation of their responses which directly pertain to developers, involving topics such as developer pay, engine features and improvements and discovery algorithms for experiences and UGC items.
Q: (CarBluGStudio) […] At RDC 2021, [Sturman] revealed that he had plans to bring dedicated servers to South America, which we still don’t have, although Brazil, for example, is the second country with the most Roblox players and developers. Does Roblox still have these plans? We’re excited to be able to play our favorite games with lower latency and I can say, on behalf of the entire community, that we’d love to hear from you. You can see this in the comments on Roblox’s Twitter posts, which are full of people asking for a server here in Brazil.
A: (STURMAN) We continue to investigate where we might place new datacenters with an eye to improving latency for users across the globe. That investigation so far has shown that networking in South America is tricky - the countries don’t interconnect well. For example, a datacenter in Brazil would not serve Peru particularly well. Thus the utility of the datacenter becomes limited. That said we’re still looking at it and balancing how we improve latencies for a large community while also ensuring those servers are well utilized.
Q: (brooke) What does the future of Robux look like for developers? Can we expect that developers will be using USD (or some other real-world currency) for all developer-related transactions at some point in the future? If that’s the case, how do you plan to support creators who aren’t able to pay for things with real-world currency? This is an especially prevalent question, given the latest Creator Store announcement.
A: (AELARIX) Today, we are using real world currency in areas where there are third party platform requirements or dynamics that make the use of real world currency more suitable (like Creator Store, and subscriptions within experiences). We will be learning from these areas and will use those learnings to determine where we have opportunities. However, there are no active plans today to use it for other developer transactions in the near term.
Q: (Pyseph) Hello! it has soon been eight years without any official response or awareness regarding the ability to change colors of MeshParts - in the same way as how you can edit the colors of decals. This has been requested my many reputable studios and developers, and the lack of this feature makes asset reuse multiples of times harder and wastes memory by reuploading the same texture under a different hue. Even if it is not technically plausible at this stage, receiving an acknowledgement towards the issue would be highly appreciated!
A: (STURMAN) We are working to improve how coloring/tinting happens, and we have an internal prototype of SurfaceAppearance tinting. We also have an initial API we’re experimenting with internally. We’re going to continue to work on this and understand this is a high priority request, but given the technical challenges here we have no date to announce right now.
Q: (Ben) Are there plans to allow selling of models on the creator marketplace? It would allow creators a large amount of autonomy and trust when actually selling items, and would bring the Creator Store to an entirely new level. If not, how do you plan on improving the Creator Marketplace?
A: (AELARIX) We’ll begin onboarding plugins for USD in Feb, which will enable creators to earn 100% of sales revenue (after taxes and transaction fees). We plan to enable creators to sell models via the Creator Store soon after plugins go live, likely in the 2nd quarter of the year.
Q: (Boogie) What is the current status of releasing the upcoming Audio API and enabling AudioDeviceInput? Super excited for that.
A: (STURMAN) We aim to release the Audio API in the next month or so, so stay tuned! It will allow enabling AudioDeviceInput and new opportunities for routing audio.
Q: (WWWWWW HELLO_howare) When are we getting [accessory positioning] for avatars?
A: (AELARIX) We’re working on making accessory adjustments for avatars available in the first half of this year […]
Q: (kal) [deleted]
A: (STURMAN) Great question. We would love for everyone to be able to access our powerful APIs, both Open Cloud and otherwise, without proxies as well. For the former, we’re actively working out a design to make Open Cloud APIs available in-experience. Lots of great functionality has been added to Open Cloud, and we know there’s great potential for these APIs in-experience. Quality and stability are important to us so stay tuned on an update on timing later this year. Accessing other Roblox services without proxies is further out. Stay tuned for more updates on the Creator Roadmap.
Q: (ffrostfall) Can we have clarification on when/what the spatial voice chat API is going to look like? […]
A: (STURMAN) We’re diligently working on the beta release of our new Audio API which should be out in the next month or so. It includes highly anticipated controls over sound and voice that were previewed at RDC. You can access all the use cases you mentioned including exercising more control over spatial simulation of voice, modifying voice, walkie-talkies, push-to-talk, and more!
Q: (TypeRamadan) In your previous communication, it was stated that user-generated content (UGC) accessories would be open for public uploads by early 2024. As we have entered this timeframe, I would like to inquire about the measures Roblox intends to implement to address the challenges of counterfeit and inappropriate items in the catalog, particularly in light of the multitude of counterfeit and inappropriate accessories during the current private UGC access period?
A: (STURMAN) This is an important issue. We are building a Rights Manager for rights holders to easily file takedown requests for duplicate or counterfeit versions of items they created. We plan to build additional functionality that will allow creators to sign up to be notified about potential similarities between new items and items they created. From there they can choose to take action to request takedown, etc. Rights Manager is planned for launch in the next few months. For any other policy violating items (like nudity, etc), we are continually improving our detection systems and processes with human moderators to detect and remove content faster and with greater accuracy. Users and creators can also utilize our reporting flow for any cases where it is taking us longer to remove the content ourselves or if we haven’t yet detected it.
Q: (Kobe) Hello, I want to ask if the upcoming code assist feature will be really helpful for everyone? Pls leak some info about that. Thx!
A: (STURMAN) The glib answer is that we certainly hope it will be helpful to just about everyone! Since the introduction of Assistant we have expanded the ability to create code from scratch from natural language, understand code and improve code with the result that code creation is now more accessible to everybody. We’ve seen a wide range of creators in the beta and are seeing significantly faster coding for users across the board. We are very focused right now on the quality of suggestions and seeing the rate of acceptance of these suggestions tick up. Expect Assistant to get increasingly more powerful over the course of the year with regular updates.
Q: (DJX) […] The roadmap says [UI Flex Layouts] is now live but it appears to still be in beta (only works in studio.) Are there any updates as to when this will be fully released?
A: (STURMAN) We are working on fully launching FlexLayouts in the next few months, so stay tuned!
Q: (Abcreator) With the beta release of EditableImages / EditableMeshes, it was mentioned that some form of asset privacy will be implemented to both APIs, with an example given of UGC avatar-accessories as non-editable. Is there a reason why assets (which are loadable in-experience) are not going to be editable regardless of whether I have the intent on publishing or not. I really just want to make some cool effects on player avatars (and not publish such effects), but this upcoming restriction is giving me fear that it may not be possible soon.
A: (STURMAN) Over time, we will significantly expand the capabilities of Editable* assets to do everything from supporting live replication/co-creation to supporting robust permissioning so that you can implement use cases like what you mentioned. That will all be within the confines of ensuring content creators maintain control of their creations and derivatives from those creations. For v1, we wanted to start with a smaller, more focused set of functionality so that we could bring a new capability to the platform safely and use it as a basis to learn/iterate. Furthermore, we want to make sure we have a more robust asset permissioning system generally that we can leverage to implement the right permissions for Editable*, and we didn’t want that to block the release of v1 of Editable*. Your feedback to v1 will help determine the roadmap and priorities, so please give feedback in the devforum threads about this functionality.
Q: (build) Is there a possibility of compute shaders coming to Roblox sometime in the future
A: (STURMAN) We have some improvements planned for this year for custom materials, like allowing more than global overrides with terrain materials, but bigger improvements for materials/shaders will likely come in 2025. Specifically, we are looking at ways to make custom materials more robust with more customization and to better unify SurfaceAppearance and materials. We think this will address many of the needs people have around custom shaders. Long-term, we believe we will provide customizable shaders, but due to the complexity of making them run robustly across all platforms and devices we support, it’s very much just in the research stage.
Q: (Yasu) On the roadmap, dynamic filters were put on hold. Is there any information that can be provided about why?
A: (AELARIX) Thanks for bringing this up - we acknowledge that this was a previous commitment that we are now changing. Upon further investigating the implementation of the feature, we realized that genres on Roblox are a very fluid concept, and the originally designed feature wouldn’t have worked in the desired manner. We are now thinking about how to build trusted sources of genre information: from creators, users and other expert sources, and how to do that at scale and in a way that can’t be abused. When we have a more robust design and plan, we will get back to our community with more information.
Q: (Shoomama) Will voice chat ever be expanded beyond just 50 player servers? This could open up a lot of cool possibilities for communication based experiences at 100 or even 200 player servers.
A: (STURMAN) Great question! As we improve the efficiency of voice chat we’ll raise the limits. For 2024, we’re working on increasing our voice chat server sizes to 100 users. Our long-term vision is to keep scaling to allow you to eventually connect with an unlimited number of users for more immersive experiences like concerts.
Q: (WhoseTrade) you guys say this one line quote on nearly every post touching on the topic of UGC “to help grow creator earnings”. however in this specific context of the avatar marketplace, creators continue to get the short end of the stick with no meaningful progress. when can we expect a more fair split for avatar products, especially in regards to affiliate fees earning a higher split than creators of the products themselves?
A: (AELARIX) We continue to invest into supporting a healthy Marketplace ecosystem, where different items can succeed, and prices can support more creators. The split between affiliates and creators encourages the marketing and distribution of items beyond the Marketplace, which in turn attracts more buyers to your items. We are exploring future improvements such as giving creators more control on where they sell their items so creators can make their best decisions on where to sell their products. And in the future, we will explore ways to create more flexibility on affiliate fees.
Q: (CSJeverything) Any update on when [allowing ID verification whilst underage] will become a feature […] ? This is severely impacting my and many other developers’ experience on Roblox.
A: (AELARIX) We’re actively working on this feature and ensuring it meets all safety and regulatory requirements. We will share an update as we get closer to a firm release date.
Q: (Outlook) Is there any plans to focus more on #feature-requests like has been done with #bug-reports in recent years? Over the past few years Roblox has shown a heavy focus on bug reports, while this is great and all, roblox seems to be neglecting feature requests, with many of them being left without a response from Roblox. Would love to see an effort to focus more on these feature requests in the coming year and providing an official response to each. Many of these features are trivial things that can make the development experience so much better and allow us to create things both faster and better.
A: (STURMAN) Great question. Creator input of bug reports and feature requests are a key part of how we improve the platform. We’re glad you’re noticing the progress we’ve made on bug reports. We have made significant progress on bug closures, and made sure each bug gets to a development team. But there is more work to do, as we’d like to open #bug-reports to even more creators. #feature-requests have to be handled somewhat differently. Our product and engineering teams review these regularly and those ideas go into our thinking about the roadmap. But it is one of many inputs into that roadmap process. As such, we might not take each request on as described, or even feel now is the right time (vs a bug report where, honestly, we just don’t want any bugs!)
Q: (Marcus) Do you guys ever plan on allowing us to run our code in a Roblox environment through CI? There have been numerous times that our workflows has been broken due to changes to how the security cookie works. But at the same time there doesn’t seem to be any other alternatives offered like headless studio, roblox-cli or analogous.
A: (STURMAN) A key area of focus for us right now is enhancing our support for large creator teams and more sophisticated development processes, including CI and CD. You can expect us to provide full support for CI-type functionality, so you can securely and programmatically build, test, and deploy Roblox assets, including experiences. The core capability to run tests for your environment should be possible in the first half of this year with richer capabilities to follow.
Q: (dphfox) Hello! I’ve only one quick question; can we expect to see upgrades to UI visual quality any time soon? In particular, it’d be nice to see antialiased rotated UI and fractional font sizes for smooth animation 🙂
A: (STURMAN) Our primary focus right now is flex layouts and custom styling, as we believe these will make building UI on Roblox significantly easier. Later this year, we will shift focus to work on UI improvements, and we will make sure these are on our backlog.
Q: (Lumine) Are there going to be any changes to Game Discovery / the algorithm in the near future? […]
A: (AELARIX) The Discover page represents a very small percentage of impressions and playtime, and is an area that we plan to fully revamp in H1. One important thing to note is that the main landing page for recommendations and game discovery is Home, which contributes to the vast majority of impressions for experiences, discovery and playtime on Roblox. This is the area where we have made most of our product investments and are seeing good success with new experiences breaking out and being discovered by more users. We are planning to continue to improve the user experience and recommendations on Home.
Q: (Ignited) When will future updates like the “Up Direction” to the new character physics controller be released?
A: (STURMAN) “Up Direction” and other updates to the new character physics controller should be released in beta in the first half of the year. We want to make sure we get this right and the quality level is there for the release.
Q: (vell) […] I would like to ask for some details about the “Alt Detection” and “Banning API”. Can we have more information about envisioned functionality of these such as will there be a possibly new Disconnect screen along with the new api, will users be able to provide ban reasons, length etc. Will these features come along in one function or separate? […]
A: (STURMAN) Great question. We know how important this is to ensure experiences are safe and you can manage them well. Key functions we expect to provide are the ability for a creator to use the Ban API to ban a user with configurable duration and reasons, to unban a user themselves, and to read the previous moderation history for their experience. By integrating with the platform’s alt detection, when a creator bans a user all of their alt accounts will also be banned with high precision. We expect this feature to be available by summer of this year.
Q: (younite) Currently the UGC limited profit share is completely unreasonable and unbalanced. There is no reason to make limiteds due to the expected profit loss, yet Roblox keep pushing it and promoting the feature. Will we expect to see a more fair and equal profit share for UGC limiteds in the future?
A: (AELARIX) Thanks for the feedback. Limiteds are a relatively new product for us and we are constantly looking to iterate and improve it. By having a quantity, this creates scarcity and can increase the value of the item. Since launching in 2023, we have seen Limiteds selling out and resale transactions higher than the original price. With that said, we are exploring some changes to how Limiteds work and the per-unit fees ahead of opening up creation for anyone in order to address some of these concerns.
Q: (orca) What are your plans regarding roblox-made limited items? Back in 2022 you started making old items go limited from time to time, and i was wondering if you plan on doing that again.
A: (AELARIX) Thanks for the question. We don’t have any immediate plans to do so. With that said, we are regularly evaluating our approach to Roblox-created items.
Q: (Owen) Social interaction and community is key to Roblox games. Are there plans to expand the SocialService to prompt players to join groups from in-game? Related to groups, will the new “Collaboration” feature on the Creator Dashboard that has recently been announced replace groups in future?
A: (STURMAN) Thanks for this feedback. We’ll look at expanding SocialService to allow inviting a group of players, though it’s not something we’re actively working on. We appreciate the suggestion! For social interaction broadly, we’re also thinking about how to enable durable groups, and enabling the ability to join communities too. We’ll be moving the ‘collaboration’ use cases for groups to Creator Hub over time, but these changes will not replace the social use cases for groups.
Q: (idelww) Is there any planned graphical improvement [better shadows, custom material overlays, volumetric fog, advanced graphics settings] coming for PC and higher end devices when the mobile graphics improvement announced at RDC will come in?
A: (STURMAN) Based on community feedback, many creators avoid adopting newer features due to their lack of ability on the low end. For now, we are focusing on improving mobile performance, fidelity and scalability so that our higher-end features are available to more players. As we close this gap we will transition to adding more features at the high end like some of those that you mention. [Sturman also references StreamingEnabled in a related answer]
Q: (M4nele) Will we be able to upload accessories with SurfaceAppearance? Only Bundles and LC accessories support it currently.
A: (STURMAN) Yes. We are in final performance testing and plan to release this feature soon!
Q: (metatablecat) My question regards the reworked Studio UI, generally, whats the progress on it, but also, at RDC 2023, it looked like Studio would support multiple WorldModels in the tab divider, where tools could render their own isolated views per tab (though I might be misremembering here)
A: (AELARIX) Thank you for sharing your excitement about the new Studio UI. We are planning to release the first Studio UI and ribbon update in beta in early Q2. We have no plans to release a multi-view viewport in Studio but we released further improvements on docking last November that allows for more flexibility in the UI layout.
Q: (Phantom) A Roblox Admin stated back in January of 2023 that there was a plan to release a callback loop synced with Physics rate, akin to Unity’s FixedUpdate method. The need for this is immense for numerous uses, one such being raycasting vehicles which my team has been trying to implement for a while but can’t because of this limitation. Can we expect to see an update on this anytime soon?
A: (STURMAN) This is still coming, but we are taking a step back to look at this in the context of what we call our “next-generation programming model.” We’d like to take everything we’ve learned to improve the programming model so that simple things (like data binding) are trivial and more advanced things (like streaming) are also easier and seamless or free. As we do that, we’ll enable physics scripts, but also other types of scripts that need to run at different rates, like audio scripts. Obviously this is important to get right and we are still working out all the details. Given this, we don’t have an exact timeline, but we are working on it!
Q: (Silly) Will there be a better version of the decoration system (grass) such as our own models that are procedurally placed similar to how it was demonstrated in the RDC when it was first announced?
A: (STURMAN) Since we previewed decorators a few years back, we’ve taken a step back to think about how we can support these in a more general framework. We are currently gathering feedback and working on a plan for a unified, scalable, and flexible system that works for everything from smaller objects like grass to larger ones like forests. Given other priorities this year, we don’t anticipate these improvements arriving until next year.
Q: (Rapid) Are there any plans to increase server memory?
A: (STURMAN) We do not have immediate plans to increase server memory, but we are working to improve memory efficiency which will let you do more with the current allocations. Longer term we will of course be increasing server memory, but I don’t have any concrete timeline on this.