Recently, I’ve seen a (now-deleted) flag that hid the top-bar unless the user hit “ESC”.
Now, I believe hiding the top-bar is a great idea. Especially on Desktop, users might want a larger amount of space on their screens to experience the games they’re playing better. The current top-bar in my opinion is great, but feels invasive.
To give the players more control over the top-bar UI while still ensuring a consistent experience across the platform, I believe there should be a toggle in the game settings to automatically hide the top-bar when the mouse is no longer hovering over it. Just like the “Automatically hide the task bar” option on Windows.
Here’s a mock-up of the feature that better demonstrates how it would behave:
This feels like a perfect middleground between removing the buttons entirely and keeping them there. Of course, i still think there should be an option to not have them for PC, but i feel like that is still nice. It really adds to a games immersion, not having ugly uncustomizable buttons at the top of your screen
I have no idea why they removed this awesome feature.
Especially considering that we’ve been fighting for it for a while.
What a shame.
I don’t know about automatically opening it when your mouse enters the top region though. I believe it should only be visible when the user explicitly demands so — e.g. through ESC.
I think hovering over behavior is something that most users will like the most. Only relying on ESC would confuse many users. Though, it could still be included. You could both hover and press ESC to pop the experience controls and the Roblox Menu.
A clear and concise pop-up once in a while, which tells them that they can access the Roblox menu through ESC, would absolutely not leave users confused.
Pop-ups are kind of annoying. I know from experience that the new experience chat button pop-up was annoying when it first came out.
Also, even with pop-ups, users can dismiss them quickly or just forget them. What are you going to do then? Accessibility is important, that’s why the previous FFlag got disabled most likely.
Everyone will find out. It’s going to be basic knowledge — in fact, it already is for many users.
You’re suggesting we remove all keybinds because people won’t notice and/or will forget.
I’m judging by the logic you’re presenting. You’re suggesting that people won’t notice and/or will forget, and therefore the keybind shall not exist as the only option.
I don’t think it’ll ever be an issue, especially for desktop users who can extremely easily exit the game in a very intuitive way without even interacting with Roblox itself.
The hover mechanic you’re suggesting would introduce a lot of problems. You’re calling a small pop-up, that appears once month, “annoying”. What about the menu appearing every time you just get close to the top of the screen — and what if the game has buttons up there?
It certainly didn’t. Especially for automatic chat translation, it would annoy me very often.
GuiService:GetPropertyChangedSignal(“TopbarInset”)
This also would not break existing APIs and UI systems if implemented correctly, as it would just keep updating this property that developers have already started depending on and using.
No but that’s what I’m suggesting; once a month. You’re right that I forgot to mention that.
The issue is that games want that extra space at the top. You can also easily accidentally overshoot for just a single pixel and boom that annoying menu appears.
This is what this feature request intends to do. If the developer has used the TopbarInset property well in order to create reactive UIs at the top, then those UI elements will automatically move to that empty space once the top bar hides.
User moves their mouse to the top-left corner side of the screen, top bar appears, and automatically moves the other UIs to the right, and once the mouse leaves, the other UIs will move right back to the left.
This is already how certain resources such as TopbarPlus work, they use this API to move the buttons left and right without the developer having to do anything.
That still feels invasive. The top bar should not be accessible by accident.
The fact that an open-source library uses the same method, does not make it a good solution.
I’m obviously completely aware of what your feature request is. I’m simply pointing out the flaws, and suggesting what I believe to be a better solution.
I still lack a reason as to why having it simply accessible only with ESC on desktops is an issue.
This is a less invasive solution than the always enabled top bar which already takes up quite the amount of space. Also, I don’t believe user moving their mouse over to the left-top side of the screen and seeing the top bar pop-up is an accident. It is a pretty fine solution.
Disabling it entirely should still be an option for users, especially as it would provide developers the freedom to use the top left of the screen for players who don’t need the topbar.
Won’t this force you to move your mouse to the right to access those UIs though?
I feel like if Roblox were to add this, they should let developers chose to enable it and also let desktop users have a option to enable it too, while still respecting the developer’s option of having it enabled/disabled!
I wanted to request this feature but never got myself to do it. I cannot emphasize how good this improvement is, leaving developers with entire screen to work with would lead to more space for game specific UI.