I do not disagree with the usage of declarative UI frameworks in other cases, I use them myself. But the usage of Roact or React-lua is bizarre in this situation. This UI is very static (compared to UIs for games that I use declarative frameworks for) and could be handled a lot better using different approaches.
But you should, Roblox isn’t the web. They do not work the same, its like putting the circle block in the square hole just because it fits, it doesn’t make it the best.
Frameworks like Fusion and Vide provide much better solutions specific to Roblox. (Fusions ultimate goal is to be Luau specific)
I am not saying Roblox needs to use these library’s, but that the money they spend on React-lua could be better placed in a custom framework that isn’t a port with many performance issues.
And developers used RbxGui as well, but RbxGui acts more as a component library then it does a UI library. If you look back at the old PlayerList or TopBar just as an example, they don’t use RbxGui. (At least the copies I have)
(If you click . or go to github.dev and Ctrl+Shift+F and search for RbxGui, the only use of it is a variable pointing to a ScreenGui, no usage of the actual module)
Chat wouldn’t be disabled (we have a setting for that), only the button would. The button would appear again when you open the ESC menu so chat is possible to disable.
This could also be replaced with “collapse chat to hamburger menu” to make it possible to easily enable/disable without extra button clutter.
I’m talking about stuff like self-view, why can only the developer disable it? It’s so easy to forget about. Same for other features that aren’t useful to a game yet still show up in the hamburger menu.
Name
Reason
Self View
Very situational, can be used to clip through walls, you need the camera for it to really be useful.
Music
I don’t really have to explain this, people have already said it before me so probably just scroll up. Again, situational.
Leaderboard
Keybind on PC.
Reset
Keybind on PC.
Inventory
Keybind on PC; Some games have no tools.
Emotes
Keybind on PC; Doesn’t work in R6.
Captures
Keybind on PC; Place in the ESC menu.
For everything that is useless to PC players, developers aren’t gonna disable it for people using keyboard input, they’re honestly just gonna let the player ignore it. This creates clutter when you actually want to use the hamburger menu, e.g. to report. And yes, it’s very easy to forget to disable something like self-view.
I see so many R6 games with the emote menu in there, it’s easy for developers to forget about disabling. (this will also cause accidental “.” clicks to stop movement and open the emote wheel)
These are things that I believe players should 100% be able to disable themself. Some aren’t useful in any scenarios, some players may not use emotes etc.
In that instance, hiding the feature would go against the purpose. I wouldn’t say that there’s any situation where this feature is required regardless of what type of experience it is, or what music is being played. The feature has been made due to a demand from players (and devs) to find the music they are hearing in a game. Disabling it would make that very difficult to impossible to find the source, and that would go against the purpose of the feature. To fulfill it’s purpose whenever public music assets are in use, it must be enabled. Maybe I’m misunderstanding you. I understand the desire to have clean interface, but there’s no other placement for this feature and developers shouldn’t be able to disable it when music is playing that I could want to find the source to.
The report button not being the first option always definitely seems like an issue, I can agree with that. But all these implementations of disabling features to get rid of clutter seems to be looking in a complicated direction for a simple solution, so the accessibility of the report feature doesn’t seem to be a real factor behind the reasoning for all this.
I personally use Self View on computer, and I personally use the capture feature and find the placement more convenient than inside the escape menu. I understand that there are keybinds, but not everyone finds keybinds as convenient or nice to use, very subjective preference with no right or wrong. A lot of these features are enabled and functional by default when making a new place, such as self view and camera facial movement, unless the developer goes their way to disable it.
I’m not sure how a player would disable all these things? Adding new settings just to hide or disable these buttons and features seems too extreme, and would instead clutter up the settings menu. And if no additional settings are made to hide/show these buttons and features, how else would the player do it?
I also don’t fully understand your solution to hiding the chat button, I apologize.
The emote menu is technically still usable by devs when R6 is used. It can be used for custom mapping or functions by devs. So while it would be nice if it was automatically disabled when R6 is used, Roblox can’t assume the developers intention of what they want to use or not, what to have enabled or disabled. So in the end, it’s the developers responsibility to check up on this, or act on it if a player reports it as an issue to the developer.
Personally I have never seen anyone pushing for this to be added. And I always mute in-game music whenever the option is available, because I want to listen to my own music instead.
Here are some completely valid reasons for wanting to disable the feature. Not all experiences use public verified music tracks.
I’m not sure if I’m understanding you, but your logic seems to be that if an experience is playing a public music track, then the “Music” feature MUST be available? By that logic, then all experiences that use R15 avatars should be required to allow players to use features like “Self View” and “Emotes”, but this obviously isn’t the case as both of those features can be disabled by the developer.
Developers know what’s best for their own experiences. If a developer does not want a certain feature enabled in their experience then they should have the choice to disable it. If this happens to be an inconvenience to the user then that’s the developer’s problem.
I said there should be an option for the player to configure these features on their client. Sorry if I didn’t make it clear enough, you can read more about my idea here (tell me if it’s hard to read, I might need to edit it a little):
Alt + 1 can take a quick capture on PC.
Yeah, the keybinds are also forced with no ability to change them, which is also a problem. I suppose if they do go through with their idea to add ContextActionService rebinding then this will also change, but I have serious doubts.
I agree with this, but I also feel like a lot of these features don’t need to be there. Especially in R6 games, most of these are situational. I press ESC + R + ENTER faster than I can find the reset option in the hamburger menu with all the clutter there. The more cluttered it gets, the more artificially useless it becomes.
I agree, it could be within a menu that’s sort of like Studio’s quick access bar customization and lets you drag and drop to disable and enable?
Woah this looks awesome, as I said this looks way too extreme and unreasonable for Roblox to add or the general player base to expect and utilize. Realistically only a handful of users (mostly technical people) would use this. And implementing this in a good way can also take a lot of resources and be quite complicated. One can dream, but yeah I don’t think this is happening.
And rebinding or different bindings wouldn’t change anything about players who do not like using keybinds. On screen buttons and interactions, quite a lot of people find this more ideal and comfortable to use than keybinds. While you, and some players might find that to just make sense or be more convenient, the reality is, a lot of players do not (and I’m one of those players who prefer on screen ui over keybinds)
As a chronically online youtube and tik tok watcher and twitter/reddit user (sarcasm). I see A LOT of people who ask for the source of music in content or they’ve happened to hear just outside somewhere, and also in Roblox games. AI assistants, Shazam, and another popular website and browser extension where you can directly upload mp3 and mp4 files to search for source of music has become increasingly popular. I myself have spent countless hours searching for the source of music on behalf of other players and users on other places on the internet, interestingly enough it’s one thing I actually enjoy a lot on doing, providing people with the source for music. That’s how I know there’s a sort of demand for this. And Roblox look into everything happening around the world when it comes to social interactions when thinking of new features or platform improvements, and they’ve seen the same.
And while you and others may not listen to in-experience music, a lot of people do, and it’s quite an important part of making games enjoyable to a general userbase.
Developers knows what’s best? I guess we’ll just agree to disagree, I don’t agree this is always the case.
Features like self view and emotes have a direct impact on the game, they interact directly with the game, being able to find the source of music that has no interaction with the game is simply not the same and can’t be compared equally. This badly put argument aside, we’ll just have to agree to disagree on whether or not this feature should or shouldn’t be enabled to always give the player the ability to find the source of the music, and the developer should not be able to disable this feature from the user.
Even if the music is private or not searchable, Roblox also provides the ability to report abuse on the audio source. Another reason this feature should not be disabled as long as any sort of audio is playing.
the funniest thing about captures is that it once was in the ESC menu, they made captures worse and caused tons of people to be either annoyed, confused or both from the haunt forcing the feature on, to where the captures button would stay there even if the CoreGui had captures disabled
and honestly i feel like roblox should just throw out their current UI and go back to the previous UI which people actually liked and which didn’t absolutely nuke tons of games in terms of performance/UI clipping
or yknow, just dump the hamburger menu on the right, make leaderboard, emotes and inventory pinned to the top, dump the other features below and just pretend like it’s the … button again (this wouldn’t help with performance but it would make people less annoyed since at least it would be emulating that beloved 3 dot button)
I really hope for the optimization improvements to the React scheduler to come out quickly, it has been tanking frame rates in all experiences today, I can see it having really huge spikes every frame through the Microprofiler. Really annoying and experiences are all unplayable due to it. I don’t know why does the React scheduler get worse with performance every day.
Sure, Roblox isn’t the web but it has a lot of the same problems that the web does, with the DOM being essentially an XML tree and event-driven interacts. If anything Roblox is better suited because it doesn’t have to contend with the interface being auto-positioned in the same way a browser does so the overall overhead of UI updates is lower.
You’re not incorrect in saying that purpose-built solutions are probably better, but there’s a whole bus factor involved with that. Ask yourself: what would happen to Vide if the creator suddenly decided they were no longer interested in maintaining it? It’d be fine, for a while, but eventually it’d become old and crusty like Roact is now. React doesn’t really have this problem because it’s, well, not their library; the tool for porting it exists and will always exist, and React is probably not going away any time soon.
All I’m saying is that React has next to zero maintenance cost (it had the initial cost of porting it but now that work is done and Facebook takes care of the rest), works well enough, and is really easy to learn because there’s 10,001 different tutorials out there. The performance problems are very solvable, and they’re mostly architectural problems with codebases rather than serious bug or problems with React.
Games that have a lot of UI like Clip It! and My Movie use React without any serious performance problems. There’s not some fundamental flaw with React that makes it have performance issues. It’s very much a Roblox problem.
