The ROBLOX data centers are about to get toasty – today we’re releasing our data persistence API to ROBLOX game developers!

Data persistence will allow place builders to save information about players in their games (and load it when those players come back).

Things you can do with the new API:

• Create an RPG game that saves a player’s Gold and current Level
• Spawn returning players in the exact location they were standing in when they last exited your game
• Create a building game where structures that players create are saved and loaded when they come back
• Create a game where players design their own race cars – and have those cars waiting for them when they come back
• Create a checkpoint system for an obstacle course that will allow players to save their progress
• A bunch of stuff we haven’t even thought of

I want to try this out!

There are two places on ROBLOX where you can see the data persistence API in action right now.

1. The “Welcome to ROBLOX Building” level, where we are using persistence to help us make an exciting multiplayer building game.
2. “Cow Clicker”, a quick and dirty demo that shows how to build a simple game using persistence with about than 80 lines of Lua.

Information for Scripters

Use of this new API is intended for advanced Lua scripters only – if you’re just starting out learning how to script, we don’t recommend you jump into the persistence API. Advanced scripters can find documentation of the API in the wiki. We will be curating this documentation over the next couple of weeks – as well as providing additional tutorials.

This is a highly experimental feature, subject to change. We’ll be collecting feedback from the community to determine what other functionality we need to provide to give place builders a solid yet flexible method of saving data.

- Telamon