Roblox Game Development/Data persistence

Data persistence usually refers in programming to data structures that preserve the previous version of themselves when modified. On ROBLOX, data persistence instead refers to a mechanism put in place that allows games to save data about a player in a database and to load that data later from another game server for the same game. The current data persistence mechanism, which there are plans to extend, can only save data that is said to be per-game per-player, in the sense that saved data about a player can only be loaded from the game from which it comes in a game server where the player is present. Data persistence is usually used to preserve a part of the user experience from one game server to another: if a player leaves a paintball game and later joins it again in another server, data persistence could be used to preserve statistics such as the number of times he has won versus the number of times he has lost.

There are various usages of data persistence, but most are related to preserving user experience. It is not currently possible to save data about the game itself that can be loaded at any moment.