If end-users will be given the ability to edit all aspects of the Luau Ribbon Bar (and hopefully the rest of Studio when it gets turned into Lua), my issues with the new UI, which mostly consist of the design choices will be greatly negated.
My hope would be that I would be able to edit it, through direct scripting (Does not need to show changes in real-time) in order to look like a hybrid between the old SystemMenu UI and the old/current studio Ribbon UI, attached below, which would absolutely maximize my productivity.
No offense, but the screenshot dates back to a little after RDC 2023. We would assume that the development process started back around the same time, yet the design directory is causing this issue with the font color and other undisclosed issues as of today. . . ? Why are there conflicts with the design as of today?
From the perspective of a developer, it seems that, and correct me if I’m wrong - there is poor coordination and direction between the design team and the programming team. Maybe some bugs have appeared that prevented color themes or more progression, but Roblox is a massive corporation with so many smart engineers like yourself. It just doesn’t make sense why it took so long for a new ribbon, when the process of user interface development in Qt/C++ from an independent studio would take no more than 3-4 months to fully implement.
I assure you our designers and engineers are very closely working together. This is not a conflict of opinion or taste.
What was shown at RDC was a concept mockup that we are working towards. Development started roughly around that time but it was a Qt based solution. It became immediately clear Qt styling did not give us nearly enough control to fulfill the design team’s direction. Then we had to take time to explore what could we do that would allow us to achieve the vision.
All of Roblox is coordinating to a common design system. This way our look and feel is consistent across all of our product surfaces and there’s less “guesswork” when implementing new UI. In order for Studio to support a design system, how we access styling information (colors, layouts, components, etc.) must also be consistent.
In an ideal world, there’s ONE PLACE where the background color is defined and all UI components use that value. Well Studio has been worked on by hundreds of developers, internal and external, over the last 15 years with no consistent design system or even strongly recommended way to style UI. So you get a combination of code that sometimes makes up it’s own hardcoded color values or maybe abuses color values (eg. “Man this background color looks nice for my button border!”).
Also factor in the wild west of community developed plugins UI and trying to introduce a new background color into this color soup just isn’t as simple as it should be. The good news is that, since we’re starting from effectively the ground up with a Lua + Stylesheets UI in Studio, we are now moving in the right direction.
Another thing to add here is that there’s an assumption that this is a reskin or design tweaks - put out some new icons, push some pixels and we’ve got it. But what’s really going on is that there’s a lot of this happening “under the hood”. We pushed many major changes as part of this project over the last year with the goal of making the UI more flexible and easier to mutate -none of these were visible to end users, but all of them were absolutely required.
We’re not working on top of a green field project but rather on a large, long term software project with a lot of contributors. Aside from providing the new design, we want to get to a place where the architecture of the software allows the UI to be highly customizable and better yet, easily customizable not just in look and feel but behavior. That makes our job ultimately easer, plugin devs jobs easier, and users ultimately win because they can tune the product to how they work.
Is it perfect yet? Absolutely not, and we know that - Paul’s list at the top goes through a whole bunch of stuff that isn’t ready yet. But we felt we were at a stage right now where we have a usable system that’s worth getting feedback on, so that’s where we are right now. Lots more to come, and we’re glad so many people are invested in helping us get this right.
OMG I’m so excited for this update to go live, the new UI looks so polished and I always love when engines make updates to the visuals to make it look more modern. I hope most, if not all, of the changes addressed in the first post are implemented. The top navigation can take a lot of screen space already.
You can choose which version of Windows you want to use, unlike for Roblox Studio where you are forced into the latest version whether you like it or not.
I think they have a good point that the new UI is a massive change and it will absolutely kill off efficiency for the first month or two for majority of developers. Of course we can’t have a toggle for two UI variants, because it would be a massive burden to maintain.
I’ve seen the new UI and my prediction of it being a complete failure is now a reality. It takes a lot more space, it’s mostly enlarged overall, and quick actions became slow actions, because they got hidden behind extra clicks which can severely impact efficiency of experienced developers in the long run. To me, it looks like a tablet version of studio. I can somewhat understand the changes for non-developer sites, because a lot of users are kids, but not for professional development environment where we need the tools to be reliable, easy and fast to access, and take up as least amount of space as possible. Take a look at Blender, it did pretty well with UI revamp. The direction the new Studio UI is going, is really bad, so I do hope they cancel the current redesign and come up with a better one.
