Any seasoned developer will tell you that the Output window is one of the most important aspects of building a game in ROBLOX Studio, as it displays errors that occur during testing. Though this tool helps developers find and correct problems within our development environment, often games release to the public with undiscovered bugs in them. This can be frustrating for both the creators of games and the players themselves. We wanted to find a way for developers to use Studio’s debugging tools everywhere, including their live game instances, and now they can. Say hello to the ROBLOX Developer Console.

Before this release, developers didn’t have the ability to see all the output from servers unless they scripted a special log viewer. What’s more, all error messages were difficult to access outside of your Studio instance (they were logged on your hard drive in an obscure place and folder). Ultimately, accessing errors in local scripts was difficult to do, and accessing errors on the client end was impossible.

With the rollout of the Developer Console, you can track all of your bugs inside any given instance of your game, both locally and on the server. To access this menu, hit escape to bring up your player menu, click Help, then Log on the bottom-right-hand corner of the screen. Alternatively you can hit the F9 key to shortcut these steps. By default you will be shown local error scripts, which will be color-coded. Our Wiki has an in-depth guide as to which color means what; I’ll outline the general idea below.