I’d imagine 100% of this would be skipped over if I posted a 10-paragraph word wall, so I’ll shorten it to simple sentences and a few paragraphs.
The topbar is a good update, it should not be reverted, and nobody is asking for it to be reverted. It looks good in most games and ensures that ROBLOX can freely modify the CoreGui without messing with user-created GUI – this is really good. However, the topbar is not the best UI choice for all games. The topbar is a container, and when it is empty, it’s just a functionless black bar. There is nothing to “think about”. Hiding an empty black bar, leaving only the menu does not make the game look bad. It looks exactly as it did before the topbar update, which is not ugly at all. If you need to prevent the topbar from being hidden when there are items in it, that’s fine, but if it’s empty, we should be able to hide the functionless black bar.
If you’re worried about “well does the GUI drawing plane move up once the topbar is hidden?”, the answer is no. It should continue to to be shifted down or else the menu button will potentially conflict with the user-created GUIs. If game developers want to make use of the newly opened space, they can manually have their GUIs compensate for that. Now all concerns are addressed and nothing needs to be discussed. If there are any other concerns, please list them here, because keeping them to yourself after you haven’t been able to come to a conclusion after half a year certainly won’t help anyone.
Do you know how silly this is that we’re still “considering” whether or not we should be able to hide an empty black bar after half a year? Generally your whole community has requested something for half a year and nothing has happened. When it comes to UI changes it takes an act of god for anything to happen :X It’s an empty black bar – we should be able to hide it, and discussion time is over. It’s been 6 months. Please give your developers what they have been asking for.
Notable mentions:
Interns: Tomarty, Gusmanak, and Rukiryo all posted that the topbar should be able to be hidden. Davidii thanked Gus’s post that the topbar should be able to be made fully transparent.
Quenty, easily the most respected UI designer on ROBLOX posted that the topbar should be able to be hidden
Successful front-page game developers loleris (Mad Games), AxisAngle (Phantom Forces), Owen (HEX), TheAmazeman (Hiking/Titantic), PlaceRebuilder (Reason2Die), and radiogamer (ROBLOX quest) all posted in favor of not being forced to use the topbar. Wsly, berezaa, anon80475429, Gl0in2, Widgeon, and CloneTrooper1019 all thanked posts in favor of not being forced to use the topbar.
I didn’t point them out because they’re more important than other people, but to emphasize the point that ROBLOX’s interns, most renown UI designer, and top successful game developers all requested to be able to hide the topbar or something along the lines of that around half a year ago and still those requests have not been acted upon. Here is a list of images demonstrating how much of the community has been asking for this:
