In-Game Emotes Menu

Updates Announcements
#29

It is a fantastic update, I got to try it out earlier on a couple of games and it works great. I really can not wait for the feature of this function.

9 Likes
#30

I really don’t appreciate how this update was enabled without any forewarning. The added button in the top bar is directly interfering with custom UI elements that I added, and the hot keys are breaking core features on my game. What gives?

67 Likes
#32

Thank goodness, between that package issue that keeps studio files from opening topped off by the fact that I’m out of the country and using cruddy internet, I was dreading having to go back and fix that.

13 Likes
#33

It was enabled for like an hour or so. But then again, roblox really loves flipping their FFlags back and forth /shrug

11 Likes
#40

They could have been a bit more consistent with their font choice with respect to the rest of the core UI.

10 Likes
#43

I feel like selling individual emotes is a deceptive monetisation practice. As a donation I wouldn’t be up in arms against this, but as a source of income that rivals other assets I cannot, in good faith, say anything positive about the addition of emotes.

Perhaps this may have use for games where developers allow users to use their own bought items to express themselves, but unfortunately this number is lowering as developers switch to custom characters and overwrites of player avatars. That being said, this could affect games temporarily as well until they go in and remove this menu.

A few qualms I have:

  • Opt-out feature: Features like this that affect all games and aren’t important to a game (performance updates, engine updates, so on) should not be opt-out features. Features that are merely aesthetic upgrades need to take into account the current workflow of a majority of games, even just top games, before applying a potentially intrusive update.

  • Once again, a lack of UGC: It has been pointed out that the emotes here are created by Roblox, not by developers. This leaves no room for UGC emotes. A developer is better off forking the code responsible for running the emote wheel and creating their own emote system that supports the animations they want to add or that fit the theme of their games.

    • Yes, you can change the emotes a user gets, there’s even a code sample on the OP. Does that matter? No. Developers do not earn Robux from catalogue purchases. Commissions hardly give enough to be considered payment at all. If you disable the inspection menu too (another feature I wasn’t the happiest on the boat for) and there’s no other method of purchasing assets, commissions become out of the question. You don’t earn anything.

  • Binded to a keyboard letter: This is probably the most intrusive part of this update, besides automatically enabling it in games at all. The emote wheel takes up an A-Z key on the keyboard, which games use for key binds.

    • I’m aware that it is possible to unbind the key, but that doesn’t quite make up for straight hogging the B key unless the developer explicitly overwrites it, whether with a higher-binded action or by disabling emotes in some mannerism altogether.

I can see where engineering attempted to develop this update in such a way that would try encouraging developers to use it and cover for cases that might become common complaints, but it didn’t buy in well enough. I’m probably going to make a local plugin that automatically opts out of emotes in every place that I open that’s owned by me.

Good try, but I don’t bite.

72 Likes
#44

Very well put. I will also be disabling emotes in every game of mine for the same reasons, though I do still think that they probably didn’t set out to explicitly cut us off from a revenue stream like this. At least we get a nice repository of emote animations? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

9 Likes
#45

I’m liking this update, it is pretty understanding that some Developers may rely on things like paid emotes for revenue (Mad City, Battle Royale games etc.) but on the other hand I see this being quite useful for certain actions eg. If you wanted to quickly implement a radial UI that allowed clients to perform certain actions within a tactical game like hand signals etc. Overall i’m pretty appreciative and welcoming of this update, like it’s said as well this is able to be disabled which is nice as developers that rely on their own paid emotes wont have to deal with this should they not want to.

6 Likes
#46

I see that a lot of effort has been put into this update, and I like to see that more and more small-ish updates are being pushed regularly. I also like the expression that an emote menu allows for all players in-game.

I have a few issues, which have all been covered by other developers in the thread already, but;

  1. Enabled by default, though this doesn’t affect me I can see it being a nuisance for games that don’t want the feature, or in games where the animations are intrusive to the gameplay.
  2. Lack of UGC at this point in time. (But who’s to say Roblox doesn’t have this planned for a future update? It would be cool)

I think by adding in more customisation for developers, such as custom emotes, or events for when a player dances, this will end up being quite a good little update for the platform. Good job :slight_smile:

8 Likes
#47

You can still say /e salute or /emote salute, or just the emotes you have equipped.

9 Likes
#48

While I like ROBLOX adding more features for players I personally have to object to this one - as mentioned above it hurts developers who’re facing even more declining revenue, but more than that it feels like it wouldn’t fit many/all games. Clicking on catalog and now emotes may work well for certain games where clothing and social interaction are prominent and encouraged, but not for the vast majority of others where clothing may be overridden/irrelevant, or where emotes would be completely inappropriate.

(and yes, while possible to disable both features, you then face people who get up in arms about not being able to use their precious catalog-bought features in your game specifically ._.)

12 Likes
#49

Are we able to rebind the key from B to another key?

If I have a game that uses the B key, but not the C key, can I rebind the emotes to the C key?
This may cause issues with all games putting the keybind in random places, but it’s going to be pretty impossible to find a key that is both convenient and is not already used by a lot of games.

8 Likes
#50

You can unbind the existing keybind and bind a custom keybind to open and close the Emotes Menu.

This would be done using the GuiService:SetEmotesMenuOpen()
and GuiService:GetEmotesMenuOpen() APIs.

When deciding on the B keybind we looked at metrics to see what keybinds would be convenient to use but weren’t commonly used already by games. B is not a completely open keybind but it was the best option when considering those factors.

11 Likes
#51

I like the idea of universal emotes, but I do think there should be a way for develops to capitalize on them. Otherwise, they take away a potential revenue stream from us and give it to Roblox, which makes no sense.

13 Likes
#52

I don’t know what to think about this, personally I’m on the side of not liking it.
It being enabled by default is not a great thing, and also on top of that not every game is going to use this.
Emotes are something a developer can easily make and add them selfs if they want it in their game, this essentially takes that revenue developers can make from selling in game emotes.
I don’t see what’s wrong with the /e commands either, you can disable it without making people upset they can’t use the things they bought.

To sum it up I don’t think this is good,

  1. Takes revenue from developers who already do this.
    2.Might upset players, if the game doesn’t allow it
  2. In my opinion it doesn’t fit Roblox that well especially the icons
8 Likes
#53

It’s a really cool idea and add another level of customization to player’s characters,
but…
Features like this should be a opt-in feature, not a opt-out one. You shouldn’t just force these things on. For example, voxel lighting was a change that was opt-in. This worked great for transitioning developers over. Just because it’s cool doesn’t make it ok to just shove these updates with very little notice.

To summarize

  • Make these features opt-in
  • Don’t add keybinds that could overide delopers one’s
  • Give more of a notice for this type of thing. All good updates by Roblox have had this, especially something that is made live before a notice is even released.
24 Likes
#54

This update doesn’t seem to have much of a point, since I’d expect most developers to just turn off the menu and make their own emotes that cost robux. The icon itself looks very out of place compared to the other icons in the top bar, and it should be changed to fit in with the others. The B key seems to not be a very good choice, since some games might use B as the key for doing something specific. It’ll also make normal players angry when they buy an emote and realize that they can’t use it in their favorite game, because it’s disabled. It’s a cool idea on paper, but it doesn’t seem to translate well into Roblox, mostly because of the developers choice of turning it on or off.

This is a good update and a way to move Roblox forward, but to be honest, I think it should be disabled by default. I would also add a disclaimer to the emotes saying something like, “Any emotes bought from the catalog are not guaranteed to be able to be used in game.” This could clear up some confusion of it.

Overall, most of these updates are good, but Roblox needs to get opinions from it before releasing it, because doing something like this out of nowhere isn’t going to make everybody know everything about the update.

20 Likes
#55

Will the current /e commands be affected by the addition of the emotes menu or will they be unaffected? For example, would they be given for free?

I honestly don’t mind the idea and even like it but with the feedback everyone else has given it’s clear that in the future ROBLOX needs to reach out to the developers to receive feedback on new features like these before going live with them.

Unfortunately, the trend seems to be “release or showcase feature first, feedback later” recently with ROBLOX if I have it correct given how they’ve been silent on things like the seasonal event stuff and other things. Let’s hope this changes.

11 Likes
#56

I’m not sure if I read it correctly, but would developers be able to swap the emotes Roblox made with their own emotes within the emote selection UI?

8 Likes
#58

I find myself slightly confused by the reception of this update. There are some arguments against it that I agree with, such as the fact that the icon doesn’t match the rest of the interface for some reason, but I feel like there is a key fact here that arguments such as and similar to:

fail to acknowledge. That is that Roblox has had built-in “emotes” for years already and developers have neither complained nor suffered because of it. Many players on Roblox are keenly aware of, and frequently use, the following built-in emotes:

  • /e wave
  • /e dance
  • /e dance2
  • /e dance3

Those are the ones that I’m aware of. Maybe there are more? The point is that this is absolutely nothing new. They are just improving an existing feature that has had overwhelmingly popular reception over many years and I personally see absolutely nothing wrong with that.

If the built-in emotes weren’t preventing developers from creating their own before, I don’t see how they are now. Just as Catalog built-in animation packs didn’t hurt developers, or Catalog built-in character customization didn’t hurt developers. If your game revolves around having custom emotes, they have handed you a convenient and universal API to do it with. As a developer, this seems like a positive change to me.

Edit: a little warning would be nice, though. I know that some games already implement functionality using the same keys, and this feature was enabled in every game by default. That seems like a little bit of an oversight. Just a week or so of warning would allow developers to prepare their games for compatibility.

34 Likes