Argon development discussion

[DervexDev]

Found a bug? Have some suggestions?

If so, this is the perfect place to comment!

[EthanMichalicek]

My coworker @kolson25 and I have been converting our large project from Argon 1 > Argon 2. We've compiled a list of roadblocks we've run into along the way. For now, we're working around all of these in one way or another, but having these as supported features would be amazing. 🙏

• A String Value that was a child of a Model in ReplicatedStorage consistently doesn't get replicated in VS Code/git. Other instances of String Values did get replicated as *.txt files. The full path to the String Value was: ReplicatedStorage/Town/Arena/TrackTemplate/ID (TrackTemplate is a Model; ID is the String Value). As I was typing this, we ran into another issue with a BoolValue in ReplicatedStorage that is also struggling to sync. As I was typing that, it seems that it was not limited to ReplicatedStorage - we just had the same naming issue appear in the workspace as well.
• Dealing with Packages in Argon is a bit weird at the moment. Two issues worth noting:
  1. PackageLink is not a spawnable instance. This itself is not a problem, but does sometimes result in a warning.
  2. Whenever Argon syncs a Package from VS Code to Studio (right after Argon is connected), Studio sees all of the file syncing in the Package's hierarchy as changes, even if nothing changed. This results in a new popup window window spawning per change asking if we want to accept the change or revert it to the original. In some cases, this is tens or hundreds of windows spawned on top of each other.
  3. Ideally, we'd like an option to ignore syncing Packages entirely. If we use the ignoreGlob feature, we can use wildcards to ignore the Packages (by using ignoreGlob: ["**/PackageLink/.."]), but then it deletes the Package from our workspace every time we connect Argon. Because of this, we're instead loading all of our packages on server load instead of dropping them in the workspace.
• Sibling objects with the same name in a given hierarchy will only have one instance synced to VS Code/git. For now, we're working around this by giving all siblings unique names. An option to generate IDs or use some other unique identifier might work to fix this issue.
• Attributes and Tags do not seem to get synced at all. It's possible we're doing something wrong here, but in our tests so far they have not appeared in VS Code.

For reference, we're using the following settings:

[DervexDev]

Thanks for the detailed list of problems! I will start working on fixing all of these issues when I have some free time. I have some initial notes though.

A String Value that was a child of a Model in ReplicatedStorage consistently doesn't get replicated in VS Code/git. Other instances of String Values did get replicated as *.txt files.

Make sure it doesn't get created in your project file.

Whenever Argon syncs a Package from VS Code to Studio (right after Argon is connected), Studio sees all of the file syncing in the Package's hierarchy as changes, even if nothing changed. This results in a new popup window window spawning per change asking if we want to accept the change or revert it to the original. In some cases, this is tens or hundreds of windows spawned on top of each other.

I honestly didn't know that something like PackageLink ever existed thus Argon can't manage them correctly as they are "special" instances which need custom handling.

Ideally, we'd like an option to ignore syncing Packages entirely. If we use the ignoreGlob feature, we can use wildcards to ignore the Packages (by using ignoreGlob: ["**/PackageLink/.."]), but then it deletes the Package from our workspace every time we connect Argon. Because of this, we're instead loading all of our packages on server load instead of dropping them in the workspace.

For now, you can enable the Skip Initial Sync setting. It makes Argon 2 behave almost the same as Argon 1 as it no longer checks whether the client and server are in sync.

Sibling objects with the same name in a given hierarchy will only have one instance synced to VS Code/git. For now, we're working around this by giving all siblings unique names. An option to generate IDs or use some other unique identifier might work to fix this issue.

Argon 1 assignes UUID to every duplicate instance but I don't think this is a good solution. Instead, I would like to add the ability to mark selected instances to be converted to JSON Models which support duplicates.

Attributes and Tags do not seem to get synced at all. It's possible we're doing something wrong here, but in our tests so far they have not appeared in VS Code.

Just tested and both Tags and Attributes sync properly. Could you provide more details on this problem?

Also, your *.project.json file would be very useful to solve some of these issues.

[kolson25]

town.project.json
This is our project.json we were testing with. Can hopefully get you some follow up details soon. I do know the tags and attributes were being added in Workspace to a Part when were weren't seeing them syncing.

[EthanMichalicek]

As some added context for this project file:

• Everything in our Roblox place file is placed either in one of the Global or Town folders.
• Because we turned on property syncing, the missing String Values did not end up in the project file; the file linked above remained static once we turned on that Argon feature.
• StarterPlayerScripts and StarterCharacterScripts break our format slightly because they have to remain as direct children of StarterPlayer to function.
• Town and Global in StarterGui, despite being paths, have their .data.json class names set as ScreenGui because placing ScreenGuis subfolders breaks certain features in the Roblox GUI system.

[DervexDev]

Is the problem with attributes related to #27?

[EthanMichalicek]

Doesn't seem to be - we only ever tried creating tags or attributes in Studio itself (with Argon running). The project json was not modified, but nothing was added to the folders in VS Code either (in most attempts; I think we saw a .txt file appear once or twice).

[kineticwallet]

Can someone elaborate what's the difference between an argon sourcemap and a rojo sourcemap is? Because somehow argon isn't compatible with darklua, but rojo is!

[DervexDev]

As discussed on the Roblox OSS Community after a small fix the only difference is that Argon uses absolute paths, unlike Rojo which uses relative. There will be a new option to change it in the global config.

[DervexDev]

Small change - relative_paths setting has been removed because of the problems it created. Now sourcemap uses relative paths by default and fallbacks to the absolute ones if needed.

[DervexDev]

@EthanMichalicek and @kolson25 I just started working on fixing the issues you listed and here is the current status:

• Problem with StringValue under the path you provided - can't reproduce, need a minimal repro ❌
• General problem with BoolValues - can't reproduce, need a minimal repro ❌
• PackageLinks - are now supported, and available in 2.0.9 ✅
• Instances with the same name - new way to mark instances to be transformed into JSON Models, scheduled for Argon 2.1 ⏺️
• Problem with Tags and Attributes - only affects Value like instances, fixed in 2.0.8 ✅

[EthanMichalicek]

Good to hear! Unfortunately we're really busy with the project at the moment and don't have time we can dedicate to reproducing the issues in a siloed example project, but if we happen across them again in a more easily shareable manner, we'll send it right your way.

[AridAjd]

Not sure if I'm using it wrong but I can't set Lighting.Technology through my project.json file? I tried in both implicit and explicit formats:

I also tried changing other props and they change and they are shown in the output window, however the Technology property doesn't even appear here.

EDIT: Just realized that you have to put the value of the enum, which I also tried but it still didn't work.

[DervexDev]

Continue in #59

[AridAjd]

Added a repro to the issue 👍

[DervexDev]

In Argon 2.0.11 you can finally sync MeshParts!

See the demo here