I knew you were, but I don’t want this to turn into a riot where we start PAing the staff members. This is a polite request for the topbar transparency to have it’s upper constraint moved to 1 as it should have when SetTopbarTransparency was created. You weren’t doing anything wrong, but I wanted to make sure the thread didn’t continue on that train of thought.
I can see why the ROBLOX staff members would not want to change this - it doesn’t fit with their vision and might not fit with what they want ROBLOX to be. It might also seem ‘unsafe’ to make it less obvious to users.
I would like to see the constraint changed temporarily to see how it goes. If it goes badly, it can be reverted. If it goes well, it can be declared official.
It would be important that such a test is done in an environment that has a lot of users to see user behavior. If safety / security is needed for the test it could only be allowed to the beta list users.
Of course, ultimately that’s all ROBLOX’s decision. I feel that with the amount of dev support it would be a good thing to check out.
[quote] I can see why the ROBLOX staff members would not want to change this - it doesn’t fit with their vision and might not fit with what they want ROBLOX to be. It might also seem ‘unsafe’ to make it less obvious to users.
I would like to see the constraint changed temporarily to see how it goes. If it goes badly, it can be reverted. If it goes well, it can be declared official.
It would be important that such a test is done in an environment that has a lot of users to see user behavior. If safety / security is needed for the test it could only be allowed to the beta list users.
Of course, ultimately that’s all ROBLOX’s decision. I feel that with the amount of dev support it would be a good thing to check out. [/quote]
The thing is, it was plenty less apparent before with the info it showed, so not having the black box there wouldn’t have too much effect. Especially if everything except the hamburger menu button is gone then it shouldn’t matter to keep the big black bar.
I don’t want this to turn into a flamewar about how we hate or love the topbar.
We simply stand up as developers and put out our opinion until it’s been dealt with.
Update: In terms of thank-yous, this has now surpassed the Featured Game Sort, Smooth Terrain, New Physics Solver, LinkedSource, PreloadAsync, Settable Network Ownership, Preferred Player Count, Transform Dragger, Seat/Humanoid API Update, ReplicatedFirst, and Plugin-scriptable CSG threads.
All of those are astoundingly amazing updates, especially smooth terrain and the new physics solver, yet your community has allotted more thank-yous to this thread than the threads of those phenomenal updates. We have made it very clear what we want, and the only thing we require from you is the changing of 0.5 to 1 in your topbar constraint code. We’ve been asking for this ever since the topbar was announced, and even after half a year of having the topbar in our games, we still want to be able to hide an empty black bar. Please make this happen.
What have been the counter-arguments from staff over this topic (if there have been any)? I’m interested in their reasons for not doing this. Otherwise, I agree entirely with you Echo. If there’s no information being displayed on the TopBar, there are times when it’s just a pain. I’ve reverted to setting the transparency to 0 simply to avoid players from seeing through my menu interfaces. I don’t want to resize my GUIs to cover those spots because I can’t guarantee the TopBar size will always be constant.
[quote]
New forum record?
(excluding new feature announcements) [/quote]
I think I’m the winner, Not sure though.
Also yeah, let us make this transparent please.
We got (Register)SetCore/GetCore but still no way to hide the darned empty topbar. Unless I forgot how to count, I’m pretty sure this thread has more thank yous than any of the threads asking to hide the core notifications (although I’m glad we can do that now), and it’s only a few thank yous short of surpassing the reserved servers thread. Why are we still unable to hide the topbar? I know staff members have seen this thread.
Hi, just saying this is something we all want 
My picture says it all
Update: This thread now has more thank-yous than the Humanoid Get/SetStateEnabled thread, as much as the Reserved Servers thread, is slightly short of the MaxSlopAngle/JumpForce thread, and is within range to potentially surpass the Real Cylinders and Group Games threads in the future.
We have been expressing our desire to be able to hide the empty topbar in some of our games since it was announced over half a year ago, and even though half a year has passed with something so much of us have requested falling on deaf ears, we still are trying to be professional and patient, and politely ask for the ability to hide the empty topbar. It is thoroughly disgusting that our patience and politeness have been repaid with the complete ignoring of this thread by the staff despite how many people have thanked the thread. It is likely the first non-update thread with this many thank yous, and it’s up there in the top-thanked threads range. I am extremely disappointed that something so many of us have banded together to improve is being completely ignored.
This as a feature would be really nice. It would look cleaner, too.
Earlier, I was messing around with some things and I was able to make the top bar fully transparent, however it was complicated and ‘hacky’ I’ll have to backtrack a little because I can’t pinpoint the exact thing I changed in order for it to be transparent but if I do I will inform ASAP.
I really want that :P… Because I already know that ROBLOX won’t remove it ;( rip
I don’t know why you guys are using developer support as a reason to allow it to be customized. Clearly this is not a feature intended for developers. If you want it gone you need to prove why it isn’t doing what it was intended to do, or prove that it’s seriously damaging your games (it isn’t). It was intended to make the platform look more consistent and give players a gui hub where they can access the core guis without memorizing hotkeys.
How does the topbar show the “hotkeys”? It only shows buttons which then lead to menus that lead to hotkeys. I only want the EMPTY BLACK TOPBAR to go, because that is just extra wasted space, but everything else can stay.
EX:
Steam games have an overlay if you press SHIFT+TAB, But ROBLOX has a topbar which ruins fullscreen (which is so good in games!)
Steam games have an overlay, and same with ROBLOX, they have their own menu and you can change everything from there. But why do we need an EMPTY BLACK TOPBAR on the top? Honestly if it is just to make the games look all the same, then wants the point at working hard to make good UI, when you know that you will always have some empty black bar on the top of your screen…
It does ruin games in my opinion. Everyone I know always is complaining about how BAD it looks, and because every game has it, no matter how good the developer made their UI, they will always have a topbar that ruins the rest of the game.
Let me reiterate that nobody wants the topbar gone from all games. It’s a wonderful revolution that prevents ROBLOX UI from interfering with our own UI, it looks nice, and provides consistency across ROBLOX games. The problem is that it doesn’t work out for ALL games, and when we hide all coregui elements, we need to be able to hide the functionless, empty black bar.
To answer your question though:
-
If all coregui elements except the menu are disabled (which we’re allowed to do), there’s no need for a hub since all there is is a menu button (you can’t have a hub if you only have one item)
-
If the topbar is hidden when all coregui except the menu button is disabled, the menu button will still be in the same place and the UI will still be consistent.
-
The topbar is a utility that groups all coreguis together so that they’re easy to find and it’s consistent. If there is no more than one coregui element, it loses its purpose since there’s nothing to group together, and the menu button can’t be moved so it’s still consistent even without the topbar.
I will answer your question, but first I want you to think of justification for an empty black bar when all coregui besides the menu are disabled. It no longer is a hub since the menu is the only thing in it, the menu is already consistent (its location) on its own, so the topbar doesn’t make anything consistent when all coregui are disabled, and when only the menu button is enabled, it just wastes screen space, which is extremely valuable on mobile.
The answer to your question:
If ROBLOX removed all but 16 brickcolors, our games would be seriously damaged. Why? I don’t even need to answer that since it’s so obvious. While not to the extent of that brickcolor removal, when our UI conflicts with the topbar, it makes our game look bad, and that’s something we don’t want. How can our game conflict with the topbar? When it first came out, Joe posted a screenshot of his game which already had a topbar, and now with two, it looked silly. It also conflicts when you have a solid background that covers the whole screen(for maybe fullscreen shop guis, etc) – if your background is solid orange, and then there’s a black bar at the top of the screen, it looks bad. Trey also pointed out how it made Phantom Forces look almost cartoony despite that it was supposed to be a serious fps game.
Of course the reasons aren’t game-breaking, but when the UI is consistent and easy to find without the topbar and only the menu enabled, the reasons don’t need to be game-breaking. The topbar loses its purpose when there’s only a menu button, and there are problems that result from it existing. That’s plenty of justification to be able to hude an empty, functionless black bar especially since we already have an API built to do this. I’ve given justification for why we should be able to hide the topbar when there’s only a menu button – now let’s here some justification for why we shouldn’t be able to remove it when only the menu button remains, or allow us to hide it when everything but the menu is disabled.
Developers are the people who make the games and are thus responsible for designing their games’ aesthetics. If the game calls for the removal of all of the coregui elements (except the menu), then the developer should be able to remove the empty black bar taking up the top of the screen. ROBLOX’s business model is predicated upon developers making games for people to play, and because of this every feature that affects games should be made with the developers (and perhaps also the players) in mind.