About the Topbar

I personally am against making the topbar include site info. Making Guis on roblox is one of the best parts about making your games fit under a certain aesthetic.
The top bar removes from users the ability to make a “Definite top” of the screen. I’m not going to regurgitate the whole controversial argument, but—though I really don’t see why we shouldn’t be able to remove it entirely—we should be able to make it relevant to our games. If we can’t remove the top bar, I have a few suggestions for making a compromise of keeping it.

  1. Allow the ability to set the size of the TopBar, or have it automatically adjust based off of the screen size.
    [center][size=5]It takes up so much space for small screens like mine.[/size]


[/center]
I really wish I could set the topbar to half that size at very least. It sort of just interrupts the actual game

  1. Allow us to change the topbar’s color. Black would fit perfectly with my color scheme. This extraneous grey looks a bit odd, and it still removes this “Definite top” part of it.

  1. Allow us to add our own gui elements to the topbar. Perhaps some API for buttons, such as PlayerGui:AddTopbarButton(image) or PlayerGui:AddTopbarText(string, color) just as some ideas. It would be cool if a developer were able to make this topbar relevant to his game. The core feature of the topbar is the menu button. But beyond that, it ends up being pointless when all core gui is disabled.

One last thing that should NOT happen to the top bar are arbitrarily-imposed items, such as tickets, robux, messages, friend requests, etc. Roblox is more than simply the site, the gimmicks, and the game. Roblox is a platform, and I personally believe it should be treated as an engine. The goal of a well-made game is not only to improve the standard of roblox games, but to immerse the players in an atmosphere that feels like they’re playing a real well-made game.

Personally, I like the idea of the top bar. It opens up tons of free GUI space that you wouldn’t be able to use otherwise.

If we can’t remove it maybe at the LEAST have it tween to the top of the screen (out of view, I mean), and once you hover over that area it pops back up? I have no idea, I like it honestly, but some games will suffer quite a bit.

If they don’t listen to reason like this, there’s no hope.

I’ve given up all but the last mL of it. Please don’t fail me now, ROBLOX.

There are many times when I doubt roblox as a reliable game-creating platform.

But despite the many downsides of this update, it is still in its infancy. There is a bright future for roblox if we continue in the right direction.

[quote] There are many times when I doubt roblox as a reliable game-creating platform.

But despite the many downsides of this update, it is still in its infancy. There is a bright future for roblox if we continue in the right direction. [/quote]

They seem to be pretty adamant about treating us like we’re Burger King, though. There are a billion ways a bar at the top of the screen could be made better, and despite the many ideas of how it could be made to work, they seemed to either ignore them or refute them and ignore the rebuttal. It happened with the top bar, it happened with the homepage, it will have or already has happened with SystemMenu, it happened with materials, it happened with Filtering, it almost happened with outlines. It takes a colossal amount of energy to get them to see reason that it’s basically a fool’s errand, but I keep trying to because I have hope in ROBLOX. I hate being so pessimistic, but I can’t help but connect the dots.

Based on the final outcome of materials and the outcome of outlines, I predict they’ll add one feature and say “wow look guys it’s totally customizable” and call it good. That isn’t to say that a single feature would make it 90% acceptable, because they could make it transparent or go transparent when all the guis are disabled, but they’ve been pretty adamant about saying that they will not consider it a possibility.

Yeah… Now I’m suffering.

The black frame is supposed to cover the whole screen. I think I remember seeing that you can loosely customize the color and transparency of the topbar? If so, can someone please tell me?

EDIT: I did some digging and to set the transparency it’s PlayerGui:SetTopbarTransparency(float)

http://wiki.roblox.com/index.php?title=API:Class_reference/API_dump/raw

Doesn’t seem I can change the color, so I guess now I have to change the color of the background GUI I have.

The loading screen should cover the top bar – it will always look better if the top bar is hidden during loading.

I found out at gkku’s place that you can actually almost recolor the topbar, except that SetTopbarTransparency has a maximum of 0.5, making it impossible to get the exact color you want.

Anyways, just a cool thing I thought I’d share.

This is a big nope. I am actually angry.

Games which incorporate their own top bar in their UI (like mine) currently look UGLY, because they aren’t top bars anymore. Sure, I can change it. But what about older games, games which aren’t updated anymore? These now have very strange looking UIs.

I hope the issue for “black screens” which “should cover the whole screen” gets fixed. I also hope we can remove the topbar, and moreover, that we can move that button where we can reset the player to our OWN preference (provided this is visible).

In general,

Roblox should not make drastic changes to ANYTHING. If this is done, ONLY do this to new places (aka, allow this for the default place when we hit new place in studio). Like this, you don’t “break” old games.

Is there any particular reason why we have a topbar?

It’s actually not that hard to customize the top bar to your liking. You can even add a little shadow effect using borders:

[quote] It’s actually not that hard to customize the top bar to your liking. You can even add a little shadow effect using borders:



[/quote]
But what I need is completely black.
SetTopbarTransparency only allows 0.5 as the highest number.
If there were a way to set it to 1, this whole suggestion would probably actually be obsolete (Besides the ability to resize)

Er, 0 is completely black. 1 is completely transparent. It’s Transparency – not Opaqueness.

What I’m saying is that 0.5 is the max transparency you can make it.

0 is not completely black, it’s grey. I’m putting a black frame behind it to try to make it completely black.