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Networked games like your games on Roblox come with the frustrating, unavoidable problem of lag. Fortunately, there are a couple of strategies you can use to embrace this lag and gracefully integrate it into your game’s functionality.
The Source of Lag
Before learning some strategies that hide lag, it is important to have an accurate mental model of why lag must exist in games with remote calls.
Let’s say you are one of our users in the United Kingdom. In this game, a local script allows you to press the ‘F’ key to fire a cannon. The developer has decided that cannon balls are too important for the client to handle. Consequently, the local script makes a remote call to the server so the server can be the one that fires. When the client detects that the ‘F’ key has been pressed, it contacts the server, the server fires the cannon, and the server lets the client know what happened as a result. However, because your computer is in the United Kingdom and because Roblox servers are in the United States, this requires a signal to be passed across the entire Atlantic Ocean. Twice. This takes time, and this time comes in the form of an annoying lag between pressing the ‘F’ key and actually seeing the cannon fire.
“Laggy Cannons”
In order to make that last example a little less hypothetical, this tutorial is accompanied by a simple Roblox game called “Laggy Cannons”. You can play it online here, and you can also download the Studio version for yourself if you so choose.
In Laggy Cannons, there are four cannons aimed in the direction of four moving targets. Each cannon-target pair is affected by the same artificially exaggerated lag time, but each cannon-target pair addresses this lag in a slightly different way. Some pairs handle this lag better than others. The purple pair is better than the red, the red pair is better than the orange, and the orange pair is better than the blue.
Before reading the rest of this tutorial, now would be a good time to go play Laggy Cannons and see if you can feel the differences between the four. To play Laggy Cannons, use the four teleporters near the spawn point to teleport to the cannon pads with corresponding colors. When standing on a cannon pad, you can press ‘F’ to fire a cannonball and try and hit that cannon’s moving target. Step onto the colored area of the cannon pad to return to the teleport pads and try another cannon. You can manipulate the number of seconds of artificial lag by clicking the ‘+’ and ‘-‘ buttons on the control pad near the spawn point.
The rest of this tutorial goes into depth explaining how each color’s cannon or target behaves and why. We will also generalize the strategies that each pair uses so you can more easily apply them to your games.
The Blue Cannon
Let’s begin with the cannon that really doesn’t try at all: the blue cannon. If you press the ‘F’ key, you will immediately see and hear the explosion of the cannon firing, but you won’t see the cannonball for a good while. Here is the function that is called in a local script when you fire the blue cannon:
The first line of this function uses a RemoteEvent called “FireCannonEvent” to ask the server to fire a global variable called “activeCannon”. The activeCannon here is, of course, the blue cannon. FireCannonEvent is a one way request to the server. After sending the server a message asking it to fire the blue cannon, this local script immediately goes on to show an on-screen explosion using the unshown helper function “createExplosion”.
There is no effort here to work with the lag that is inherent to the RemoteEvent. The message is sent, the explosion is created, and then we wait for the server to fire the projectile.
Lesson 1: Be Careful with your Code
The badCannonStrategy() function looks innocent enough. It fires the cannon and creates an explosion, isn’t that what we want? The problem is that it ignores lag entirely, and this is very easy to do. If you want to make excellent games, you must notice that there will be lag here. Read on to learn what you can do about it.
The Orange Cannon
The orange cannon slightly modifies the blue cannon’s strategy in order to synchronize the firing of the projectile with the explosion. The function that fires the orange cannon looks like this:
You can see that the only change here is the first line of the function. Instead of using a RemoteEvent to fire the cannonball, the orange cannon uses a RemoteFunction called “FireCannonFunction”. You may remember from the Articles/Remote Functions and Events|tutorial on remote calls that a RemoteFunction differs from a RemoteEvent in that it has a return value. While a RemoteEvent is only a signal from the client to the server, a RemoteFunction is a signal from the client to the server and also a return value from the server to the client. Furthermore, because the client expects a return value, it will actually wait for this return value to come before it moves on in its local script. This is exactly the feature the orange cannon script takes advantage of. This slightly better cannon-firing function waits for the server to say it has fired a cannonball before it moves on to create the accompanying explosion.
Lesson 2: Synchronize the Experience
The blue cannon doesn’t make sense because you see the cannon explosion long before you see the cannonball. In the real world, explosions and cannonball firings occur simultaneously. In order for a game to be fun and immersive, it shouldn’t be violating the player’s expectations over silly things like this. Follow the example of the orange cannon and use RemoteFunctions to synchronize events across the client and server.
The Red Cannon
While the orange cannon solves the problem of unsynchronized cannonballs and explosions, it actually exposes another problem with lag. When the player presses the ‘F’ key to fire, there is a significant delay before the game responds at all. This is called input lag, and it is one of the things that players hate the most.
There is a simple trick you can use to remove input lag. You can’t speed up how long it takes for the cannon to fire. No matter what, that is going to take the round-trip time it takes for a message to go from client to server to client. You can, however, give the player some other immediate feedback that will make them feel that the game is responding to their commands.
The immediate feedback the red cannon chooses to give is a sound. When the player presses ‘F’, the red cannon immediately begins to play the sound of a cannon fuse burning. This sound will play for as long as it takes for the server to respond to the RemoteFunction. Once the server responds, the red cannon turns off the burning fuse sound and creates an explosion that accompanies the projectile the server just fired.
If you go play with the red cannon, it should feel totally natural. There is still a delay between pressing the ‘F’ key and seeing the cannonball fire, but it is unnoticeable because the cannon incorporates this lag into the way that it works.
Lesson 3: No Input Lag!
Players hate input lag. It is frustrating to feel a disconnect between yourself and the game. Though it may be necessary to have a laggy response to player input, you can always give them something small to indicate that their request has been heard. This can be a sound, a changing brick color, or really anything at all. Let the players know that they are being listened to and you will have happy players.
The Purple Target
The purple cannon works in exactly the same way that the red cannon works. The difference between the purple platform and all of the other colors is the functionality of the moving target.
When you hit the blue, orange, or red target, you will notice that there is a delay between seeing the target get hit and the resulting “ding” sound and score update. As an example, the “ding” and score update for the blue target is executed by the following server function:
We know that something as important as the player’s score must be handled by the server. Therefore, there must be a delay when updating a target’s score. But what about the sound of hitting the target?
Although the server is ultimately the one that decides whether or not the target was hit, the client is perfectly capable of immediately playing the target hit sound itself. Worst case scenario, if the client and server have a rare disagreement over whether the target was hit, the player will experience a discrepancy between the “ding” sound and the score update. This might happen one in five thousand times, and it is a cost that is well worth giving the player immediate feedback. Therefore, we can actually split the previous server script into a server script and a local script:
Lesson 4: Split your Scripts
Sometimes you have to do half the work on the server and half the work on the client. Don’t be afraid to detect the same event twice. The local detection gives the player feedback, and the server detection handles important game logic.
Lag in the Real World
The default artificial lag for Laggy Cannons is one second. This is layered on top of whatever lag your machine naturally experiences when playing a Roblox game. Across our player base, we see players with lag ranging anywhere from 0.1 to 1.5 seconds. Average lag seems to hover around 0.3 seconds. Luckily, you are now equipped with the tools to handle this lag.
Testing Lag in Studio
If you want to simulate lag in Roblox Studio, you can go to File -> Settings -> Network -> IncomingReplicationLag and adjust the number of seconds of lag that Studio will simulate when running a test server.
Related Articles
Contents
- Where To Download
- Roblox Studio Editor Tools and Features
- Getting Help & Support
What is Roblox Studio?
It’s the tool from the Roblox Corporation used by game developers to create and publish games to the Roblox platform. The program allows you to build creations and use Lua scripting to bring them to life. All games on Roblox are created in Studio by people like you and it’s free to get started.
Once you’ve learned the basics, you’ll be confident in your ability to do and achieve more with it. Getting to grips with it will offer you a better chance of creating awesome games. The programming language used in Studio is a LUA, and is easy to learn, with practice. Before long, you can be creating your own games, complete with extras such as game passes and in-game upgrades for the players. Using Studio is a must if you want to move into game development on Roblox.
Can I get Studio on Chromebook?
Unfortunately, it is unavailable on Linux and Chromebooks, however you are able to play Roblox games on a Chromebook using Chrome OS.
Where To Download
Just before we get started, there’s a chance that if you’ve played a Roblox game before, Studio may already be installed on your computer. To check this, on a Windows PC click Start and search for “Roblox Studio”. On a Mac, check your Applications folder in the Finder to see if it’s there.
If not, don’t worry! There are many different ways you can get to finding the Studio installer. The easiest way is to head to https://www.roblox.com/create and click on the Start Creating button. This will prompt you to install the Studio application. Your browser may ask you to confirm this, so make sure to accept any pop up which asks to install Studio.
Don’t forget that roblox.com is the only place where you can download Studio so only ever dowload from there.
If you’re interested in learning how to use the program to the best of its capability so you can start making your own awesome Roblox games, check out my Roblox scripting videos here If you’ve ever played a Roblox game before, there’s a high chance that Studio has already come pre-installed on your computer with the Roblox Player application. Do a search on your computer before you download Studio to see if you already have it installed.
How To Get Started
Now that you’ve installed Studio, go ahead and open it up. You’ll be asked to sign into your Roblox account, so make sure you do that. You may also hit a CAPTCHA check to make sure you’re not a robot.
Now that you’re logged in, you should see this templates page. This page allows you to pick a template to start building your games off of. Go and select the Baseplate template. We will not be using other templates for now.
Roblox Studio Editor Tools and Features
Explorer Panel
The Explorer panel is used to show all of the objects in your game, in a list view. Some objects can be inside of another object, and this is called the object hierarchy.
An object can be a child or a parent of another object. For example, the Baseplate is a child of the Workspace as it is inside of it. (The Workspace is where all visible objects in the game are stored).
Another way of saying this is that the Workspace is the parent of the Baseplate.
So a parent object is an object that has another inside of it. A child is an object that is inside of another. Think of it like a parent in real life, who looks after a child.
Properties Panel
The Properties panel is used to customise objects and edit their behaviour in game.
For example, if you wanted to change the color of a part, you would select if in the Explorer window and then change its appearance or behaviour in the properties panel.
A property is something that can be changed to alter the way an object behaves or looks.
Some example properties include Transparency (whether an object is clear or not), Color, Size, Position and Reflectance, although there are lots of different properties for each object.
Toolbox Panel
The Toolbox is another important panel in Studio. This panel allows you to insert other objects created by the Roblox developer community. You can insert models (an object or collection of various Roblox objects, e.g. a fighter jet or a pre-made script that does something), images (uploaded by the community to use on Decals, Textures and GUI image elements), sounds (used for Sound objects to play audio), meshes (used in Meshes or MeshParts to create more advanced models) and Plugins (used to enhance workflow in Studio – I’ll write more about plugins at a later date). The primary use of the toolbox for most new developers is just to insert models and images.
An example of a trusted source is one which has the orange tag on the model icon (as shown in the image). This means that the model has been vetted by Roblox, so you can be sure that their models will not contain any malicious objects.
Ribbon Menu
There are lots more tools in Studio for use when designing your game. Most of these tools can be found in the menu at the top of your screen, called the Ribbon Menu. Similar to other programs such as the Microsoft Office suite of programs, the Ribbon Menu at the top separates key tools into different categorised tabs allowing you to easily and quickly navigate to your desired tool.
Select, Move, Scale & Rotate functions
The first four tools are the Select, Move, Scale and Rotate tools.
These tools are used for manipulating objects that are in your game.
The Select tool allows you to select an object in the game world. Once you select an item, it will be highlighted in blue in the world but also in the Explorer window.
Try it out if you like, insert a model from the Toolbox and then click to select it using the Select tool!
Clicking an object will automatically use the Select tool.
An alternative way of selecting this tool is to press Ctrl + 1 on a PC, or Cmd + 1 on a Mac.
You can also click and drag the object to move it around in the game world.
Moving the Camera
Don’t forget, you can move the camera in the game world by pressing the WASD or arrow keys on your keyboard. You can also rotate the camera by holding down the right mouse button and moving your mouse.
Moving around
The recommended way to move around in Studio is to use the arrow keys and right mouse button at the same time.
This allows you to easily move the camera to where you want it to go. If you want to quickly focus on an object, you can select it in the Explorer panel and then press F on your keyboard.
This will focus the camera to that object, and is especially handy if you’ve got lots of objects in your game and a large map, and you’ve forgotten where you’ve put that specific object.
Selection Tool
The Move tool is similar to the Select tool, you can still select items with it, but it allows you to move an item more precisely along three axes, X, Y and Z.
The Y axis (green) allows you to move an item up or down. The X and Z axes allow you to move an object sideways.
Each axis has a number which represents how far away it is from the centre of the game world (co-ordinates 0,0,0 – one for X, one for Y, one for Z). These three number values can then be combined to generate a co-ordinate for a specific position in the game. For example, if I wanted to move the barrel to the edge of the map, its X,Y and Z values would make up a co-ordinate which would be at the edge of the map.
As you move an object, its position property will change. Not all objects have a position property – only Parts and MeshParts do. A model does not have a position property as it is a container of parts / objects – which have their own per part as each part may be in a different position to each other.
The final of the first four main tools you need to know about in Studio is the rotate tool.
This tool, again similar to the others, has three different axes, X, Y and Z, and allows you to select and rotate your object along each one. You can select the degree interval that you want to rotate the object along in the Snap to Grid panel in the “Model” tab if you want to refine your rotation.
You can also press Ctrl + R to rotate the object at 90 degree intervals, or Ctrl + T to tilt it at a 90 degree interval. If you’re on a Mac, it will be Cmd + R or Cmd + T.
How to get Studio on a iPad/Tablet
Right now, the program is only available on Windows and Mac computers, which means you currently can not get Studio on your iPad or tablet. If you really want to use Roblox Studio on your iPad, there are various hacky ways you can do so, such as remotely logging into a computer if you have one from your iPad by using a program like TeamViewer.
I explain more about this method at this post here:
Rendering Settings – what should I use?
You may be wondering what rendering settings (graphics mode) are in Studio – you’ll find the setting in the settings panel of Studio, found by going to File > Settings.
This panel is used to determine the quality of the rendering done by your graphics card to show your game world. A lower setting will mean reduced quality of how your game looks, and a high setting will mean a higher quality and more detailed world. When you’re in Studio, your computer has to work hard to render the game, so that you can see it and move around in the game world.
If you are experiencing lag in Studio, consider turning this down to a low level. This will mean that your computer has less work to do when rendering the game world view, which means Studio should run faster.
You have two different settings: EditLevel and EditQualityLevel.
Saving Your Games/Projects
In Studio there are two ways that you can save your games/projects to the Roblox platform. You can save a project locally to your computer just as you would do with other documents. You can also publish your project to Roblox’s servers in the cloud.
This means that you will be able to access your games/projects from other computers that you’re logged in to Roblox in, which is great if you use multiple computers or access Roblox from multiple different locations. It’s recommended that you use both methods in case either go down and lose your data. If your computer breaks down or there’s a disaster which wipes your data, you’ll have a backup in your Roblox publish.
You can also access old versions of your place that you published to the Roblox platform. In case you make a mistake or break your game, you can revert it back to a previous version to restore any damage you have done.
To do this, head to your Roblox place’s game page, click the three dots next to the title and click Configure Place. You can then click on the “Version History” tab to access all the published versions available to revert to. Select the version you wish to revert to, and then open your place again in Studio.
In order to publish and confirm your revert, you will need to open your place and publish it to Roblox as a new version. This is because right now, you have only reverted your Studio – if someone plays your game they will still see the current non-revered version. So open the place up in Studio and go to File > Publish to see those changes take effect in your game.
Getting Help & Support
Don’t forget, if you’re having trouble getting your Studio to work, you can contact Roblox’s technical support team by filling out the form here:
The technical support team are well equipped to deal with all of your Studio queries and should get back to you via e-mail within a few days.
Not Responding
If Studio is not responding, don’t panic. Just leave your Studio window open and don’t click or press any keys to try and restore it. Just wait patiently for a few minutes. The most usual cause of the not responding issue happens when you make Studio carry out a huge task, such as inserting a model full of lots of objects or running a particularly intensive script.
The default save time is 5 minutes, so check your AutoSaves or RecentSaves file to check if there’s any work there that can be restored. The AutoSaves and RecentSaves are stored in your Documents folder under Roblox. These are accessible from the File Explorer on Windows and the Finder window on a Mac.
Commonly searched problems with Studio include:
- Not responding
- Won’t open
- Error code 6
- Login problems
- Mouse glitches
- Permission errors
- Toolbox not loading
- Plugins not showing
- Keeps crashing
- Laggy/lagginess
I hoped you found this 2021 Studio guide useful. The Roblox platform is a great opportunity to create wonderful and exciting games from your own imagination. Players will reward well thought out game creation by returning to play time and time again.
For further tutorials including how to make your own games in Studio as well as new updates, check out my channel or Roblox’s own resources at https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/.
Keep scripting!