BillboardGui BREAKS when viewed from Top-Down

Reproduction Steps
Here is how to produce this glitch step by step:

  1. Place down 2 or more parts next to each other.

  2. In each part, insert a BillboardGui.

  3. Inside each BillboardGui, insert anything you can see (Frame, text label, image, buttons, etc)

  4. In your command bar, paste the following code to view your pats from a top-down view:
    local cam = workspace.CurrentCamera cam.CameraType = "Scriptable" cam.CFrame = CFrame.new(cam.CFrame.p,cam.CFrame.p-Vector3.new(0,1,0))*CFrame.Angles(0,math.rad(0),0)

  5. Once you are viewing the parts in top-down view with the code pasted above. Change the math.rad() number to anything other than 0 to see the UI, but if you set the angle EXACTLY to 0, you will only see one of all of the billboard UIs

It is pretty easy to reproduce but is a very specific bug that only occurs if you look at the UI from an exact angle, but very annoying while I’m trying to create my game.

Expected Behavior
I’ve been working on this game for a couple of weeks with the exact same view and UI system, but I haven’t touched it for a few days (And it was working perfectly fine when I closed roblox studio a few days ago), and ever since I opened the project today, I’ve been experiencing this very weird UI visual glitch.

I expect to see all the UI normally like this:
image

Actual Behavior
But instead, (Ever since I opened roblox studio today) all the UI disappears when viewed straight down. All disappear other than 1 of them that is.
image

This never happened before and doesn’t even make sense as to why or how this is happening? Hoping this is just a typo or something like that and it will be fixed soon :frowning: Not able to work on my game until then :confused:

Workaround
Nope

Issue Area: Studio
Issue Type: Display
Impact: High
Frequency: Constantly
Date First Experienced: 2021-09-21 00:09:00 (-04:00)
A private message is associated with this bug report

5 Likes

Thanks for the report! We’ve filed a ticket to our internal database and we’ll follow up when we have an update for you.

2 Likes

I hate to bump the thread, but I wanted to chime in to note that this problem seriously affects my game too.

I’m working on a top down space shooter, and after a forced hiatus (thanks, University) I’ve come back to find that my billboards are totally broken.

All of the ships here except the one with the yellow center piece should have a health bar. You can see that some of them don’t, and that some of them have really broken UIs (the small and out of place health bars).

The behavior becomes “more normal” if I angle my camera (by changing its type to Orbital):

However, some of them still have missing billboards (the black ship in the center, as well as the white/black camouflaged ship on the right).

Also, the size breaks if I screw around with camera settings (changing CameraType): I changed the type to Orbital to take the screenshot above, but when I change it back to Scriptable, I get this:

image

Something appears to be broken with Billgoard GUIs.

Noteworthily, for a long time (I would estimate probably about 5 months, but I can’t recall for sure), the billboards would not show up upon first loading into the game in the live version (i.e. not in Roblox studio); they would only render on ships that were spawned in AFTER the player joined and first loads the game world; ships that were spawned beforehand (and appear to the player!) did not show billboards. This behavior still persists today.

Even more interestingly, the billboards seem to work fine in the live version (after the ships are respawned), suggesting that this may be confined to Roblox Studio:

image

I think I’m going to have to implement my own custom version of Billboard GUIs by constantly positioning standard UIs, which is unfortunate and probably not going to be very performant.

I’m more than happy for anyone at Roblox to reach out to me if you need any more information or if I can be of help.

Stop joking. You’re not from Roblox staff…

They were staff at the time of posting FYI.

Grey name means they were off-boarded, that’s why they have no more staff tag and no trust level.

6 Likes

Hi, I was not able to reproduce this issue by following the steps you posted?

Can you please check if this bug still occurs for you?

Thanks!

Hi @Crackop @hellhawk just checking if you are still able to reproduce this issue? I checked again and I wasn’t able to reproduce following these steps:

Here is the result I get:

I’ll close this ticket since it’s not reproducible anymore.