Deprecate + Hide LandscapeLeft and LandscapeRight as options for ScreenOrientation

As a Roblox developer, it is difficult not to make mistakes in selecting the right value for StarterGui.ScreenOrientation, because of the existence of LandscapeLeft and LandscapeRight. These options should never be picked by developers, because you risk giving players an upside-down experience and needing to have them turn their screen.

There is absolutely no reason for developers to ever want to pick LandscapeLeft or LandscapeRight. They are redundant because picking one or the other will upset a significant portion of the playerbase (I’m not sure if it’s exactly 50%/50% between the two, but it seems to be at least 75%/25% in how players normally are holding the device as the game starts).

Developers should always pick either Portrait, LandscapeSensor, or Sensor. There is no use case for wanting to fix the screen into either left or right orientation, considering that you are forcing part of your players to physically flip their device which is a really bad experience (consider someone with their tablet/phone plugged into power, and they can’t turn their device without the cable being too short, or they can’t easily reach for device buttons anymore after turning due to motor issues or device layout).

If Roblox would deprecate these two enumerator items and remove them from the ScreenOrientation dropdown, this would improve the mobile experience both for developers and for players, because developers will not be able to fall for this trap anymore and accidentally inconvenience their mobile players.

7 Likes

I think there definitely isn’t a reason to ever set the ScreenOrientation to LandscapeLeft or LandscapeRight on StarterGui, but maybe these are useful for the ScreenOrientation property on playerGui? They could be used to make the users screen always be upside down for some in game disorientation effect (or something like this).

That seems better implemented as a camera transform though? I don’t think you’d want to read screen orientation, then flip it, then listen to an event while the “confusion” effect is active and flip it back if they flip it again, etc…

It doesn’t seem like we should ever force the user to physically flip the device. Perhaps there are niche use cases for this for puzzle games / effects, but at least they should not be present in the dropdown for StarterGui.

3 Likes