As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to fork the player list and new bubble chat in order to make changes to its functionality.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I’ll be able to make further customizations to these features without entirely remaking my own version. There are no provided customization options for the player list, and in terms of the new bubble chat you can only make certain customizations globally (for all players)
Why is this an issue? One of the things I loved to implement was the ability to have a custom chat bubble color for users with a certain Game Pass. Well, I can’t do this anymore, which reduces the amount of Game Pass features I can offer to players. As I’m unable to alter the player list easily, I’ll be unable to fully disable the use of Display Names within my games unless I make an entirely new player list - which I don’t want to do as I love the design of the current player list. It also stops me from adding other customizations to the player list, such as updating the colors, updating the positions, and potentially having unique features on the player list such as an icon for players with a certain Game Pass.
As a Roblox developer, I should have easy control over the functionality and design of core systems in my game such as the bubble chat and player list. Why limit us?
The bubble chat script still needs to be able to be forked eventually regardless. More customisation options isn’t sufficient enough to cut it and I simply still do not agree with moving backwards from having the script developer-accessible to making it a CoreScript just to access some libraries even if Roblox is able to add enough options to “justify never needing to fork”.
The freedom given to developers with the old bubble chat script to modify it in any way, from simple visual customisations to behavioural as well as the code involved in rendering bubbles, is what really got me into playing around with bubbles and even creating tutorials on ways to modify it.
What about the player list? We can’t even change the font.
To be honest, I’d rather Roblox just let us fork these scripts instead of wasting valuable development time and resources to create customization options we could just create ourselves if needed and given the ability to fork. While I appreciate the effort made by the teams behind these features, I don’t appreciate the lack of freedom we are given as developers to understand how these features work and to make our own modifications.
While you might be able to argue these are complex systems that new developers might not understand, surely the code is readable, uses a common naming convention and has clear documentation? I’d expect nothing less from such a large company, and if so, it could provide a great learning resource for people with no experience creating custom leaderboards and chat systems should they ever want to make their own.
Roblox is all about user-generated content and unique experiences, so why not let us make our own modifications to the most widely used features on the platform? Doesn’t make sense to me.
I hope this is addressed. Documentation for custom chats is deplorable as it is, making forking the default chat the safer option anyway. Leaderboard documentation is equally terrible, and especially given that many people liked the old leaderboard, we should be able to fork that as well.
I’d still be interested in having it addressed by staff if we’re allowed to fork the new Roact-based Bubble Chat. I’ve been able to extract it fully from CoreScripts and modify it locally, but I am not entirely comfortable with this from a Roblox licensing perspective (it’s not open source licensed), and I am definitely not comfortable with releasing this publicly.
I’d like to add that I do absolutely understand and agree with the justification behind not making it an explicit open source module like the old BubbleChat given how it is closely bundled and dependent on many other Roblox Chat scripts. I also understand that the ideal intention would be for the exposed API to fully control the BubbleChat but as a developer it’s still likely (and in my case essential) to have the knowledge that if necessary, I can introduce or test new features that aren’t covered by the general Roblox use cases.
If it’s possible to get some answer on this it’d greatly increase my confidence in my endeavours
