Hi y’all!

We’ve recently rolled out and enabled two improvements to the Roblox Installer on Windows that I’d like to briefly describe.

Improved Admin Install

As many of you know, if you launch the Roblox Installer by right-clicking on it, and selecting “Run as administrator”, then we would install the client/studio in your “Program Files” folder, instead of in your local user folder. This worked fine on the initial install, but on subsequent updates the installer would get confused, and forget about the original “admin” install, and start installing in your

user folder again.

We’ve just enabled a fix for this, so if the installer detects an existing “admin” install, it will assume that you want to keep using this installation, and it won’t create an additional user install. Because most of you don’t install Roblox with administrator privileges, you shouldn’t see any differences, and the installer will keep installing and updating in your user folder.

For those of you who do install as administrator, one difference you’ll notice is that when it’s time to upgrade, the installer will detect that you have an admin install, but because its not running as administrator, it will try to relaunch itself with administrator privileges, which will cause Windows to display a “UAC” window, asking if you allow it to make changes to your computer. If you select yes, then the installer will relaunch and your existing admin install will be updated, and if you select no, then the installer will fall back to doing a normal user install.

Bundled Installs

A feature request we get from time to time is the ability to be able to easily install the Roblox Client or Studio on a large number of machines without having to fetch everything over the network for each install (basically what you’d get with a MSI file or similar).

In the future we’d like to be able to provide a convenient way to allow for this from the web site, but in the mean time we’ve implemented a feature that will allow you to create a “bundled install” yourself, that you can then use to install Roblox from.

To use this, first open a command line prompt (by for example running “cmd” from the Windows start menu), and traverse to the directory where Roblox is installed (the exact location will depend on your user name and the version number of the client, but an example could be “C:\Users\mrdooz\AppData\Local\Roblox\Versions\version-3ee077f3d35243a7”).

Next, run the installer with the -bundle command line option, ie

RobloxPlayerLauncher.exe -bundle

The installer should display the familiar installation window, but it will say “Creating bundle…” instead of the usual text. It will also print progress to the command line (fun fact: this came as a feature request from the person doing the code review, because he wanted more of a hacker feeling!).

Once the installer is done, it will have created a bundled version of the installer, which will be a single .exe file (the name will depend on the version number, right now it should be “RobloxPlayerLauncher_version-3ee077f3d35243a7.exe”), that internally contains everything needed to install the client or studio. This bundled file can then be copied to a USB drive or a network drive, and you can use it to install client/studio onto other machines as you see fit.

If you have any questions, comments or observe anything weird, don’t hesitate to comment in this thread!