I agree with this post, 100%. The around of space reserved for the dynamic thumb stick, in my opinion, is obnoxious. Although I don’t, nor have I ever tried to, cater to touch controls, I do design my UI to support all screen resolutions, if the project ever goes mobile. I have tested the project on mobile and half of the UI is unusable/unseeable when the player is using dynamic thumb-stick.
The project I am working on is a shooter like Fortnite and PUBG, removing the thumbstick would just be a pain for mobile players if we ever release to them. I feel like not many people use the thumbstick because there are really not any mobile shooters like Fortnite or PUBG on the platform right now. I think the platform should be preparing for the future and not removing good features because they don’t apply to the present.
This is my opinion, please don’t flame me. Please provide constructive criticism if you don’t agree with my opinion.
I personally find it hard to use DT on my iPhone 7 because of how big the corner is. I mainly use Thumbstick/Thumbpad because it’s a lot smaller than DT.
Thanks to everyone who responded on this thread. We value your opinions and appreciate the time taken to explain your points of view. Many of you backed up your opinions with clear use cases and explanations. For those of you who did not, we would appreciate it if you would explain the issues you’re experiencing with Dynamic Thumbstick and avoid posts such as “This is the worst!” or “My users hated this change!” without any other info, as we can’t act on that and it doesn’t help us understand the problems.
Here is a summary of the issues being reported as we understand them:
It interferes with the GUIs I have on screen / takes up too much space
The GUIs should be prioritized with DT, so if you tap on a GUI in the DT lower left corner area, the GUI should work properly. This is NOT the case with the legacy thumbstick
If this is not what you are experiencing, please let us know with repro steps
This is also an issue with legacy thumbstick: if you put GUIs in that area, the player may accidentally hit one of the buttons during intense action
Recommendation - instead of having lots of GUIs on the screen in that area, try minimizing the number of GUIs on the screen - this is always a good thing to do in general. This can be accomplished by having a single menu button that expands out to bring up a list of options, or a separate menu screen (e.g. Dungeon Quest inventory)
Action RPGs on mobile are an interesting example; they generally put the action buttons around where our jump button currently sits, and they leave the left corner open for the dynamic thumbstick. Here is a complex example (I wouldn’t recommend adding this many buttons… but you get the idea)
We don’t understand this argument. With the DT, wherever you put your finger in the lower left corner, becomes the center point for your thumbstick. The legacy thumbstick works in the exact same way; the center point is set when you first put down your finger, except the range is much smaller, so you have to look down in the corner to make sure your finger is hitting the correct area, which takes you away from the action on screen.
The only difference is the range available where you can put your finger down
With DT, auto-jump is enabled
Valid point, we need to respect the auto-jump setting for every control type
We will fix this
Don’t like change / players and I are used to the old version
Understandable, but not a strong argument
Being against change would mean that Roblox never innovates or moves the platform forward
I hate it / my users hate it
Need more info!
Would like to keep the option of the legacy thumbstick for now, my users prefer it
(see “Don’t like change” above…)
We hear you - we’ll keep this for now as a non-default option, and continue to watch the % usage among our users
Thanks again to everyone who has responded. The information and opinions are valuable and we love to see the passion from our developer community. Keep up the good work and we will do the same!
Feel free to add further comments if we missed any key points here. Thank you.
Thank you for responding to all the feedback in this thread in much detail, that is very much appreciated by the developer community. Most of my feedback spawns from the developer perspective, and I can only assume that Roblox has done the required user testing and research to see how all movement modes are used by players.
Some of the point you’ve discussed are interesting to me, because they are very situational to the context of the games they are applied to. On Roblox, while Roleplay games are nowadays dominating the popular charts, there is a wide selection of diversity both in game genres and target audiences each looking to provide unique experiences. For some of these experiences and to older audiences, it makes sense to provide support for different input modes and touch controls.
Here’s how I see this change as a developer;
When currently using Thumbstick, there is an always-visible image on the screen to indicate where the Thumbstick is located. This location is semi-dynamic in the sense that it will automatically adjust it’s center point when the player starts to interact with it. With this thumbstick developers and players know how much space is dedicated to movement controls, and the more predictable layout is nice for accurate games such as shooters.
Looking at the entire screen, movement controls mirror nicely with the on-screen function buttons to jump, shoot, and perform other in-game actions. This leaves plenty of room in the middle of the screen and around the dedicated touch areas to Move the camera and tap-and-interact with items in the world. It is very clear what area to touch to interact with controls, and which area is dedicated to interact with items in your viewport and your character.
With the Dynamic Thumbstick, there is no visual indication as to where the thumbstick is located. There is only reserved screen space that is fully dedicated to this functionality, despite not communicating it. Amongst Roblox Mobile players it is a known convention that some games use this ‘magic’ control area and they are aware of how to interact with it, but amongst a less familiar audience or players coming from a Non-Roblox gaming background, they have no clue of the specific functionality. With this thumbstick developers are also not certain of the space reserved for movement controls.
Zooming out to the entire screen again, there is an imbalance of movement controls focussed on the right side of the screen. The usable viewport-interaction screen area is greatly reduced and any interaction on the left-half of the screen is routed to move the players character. Actions such as moving the camera or interacting with items in the world, which the player assumes can be performed by tapping parts of the screen that are empty of GUI and movement buttons, can no longer be performed because they are hijacked by the Dynamic Thumbstick. The small bit of screen space (Blue in the image) that can be used for these actions will likely shrink when developers need to move more buttons to the purple action-button area.
To come back to some of the points you brought up;
It’s not just the range available, it’s the difference that this ‘range’ is no longer communicated to the player in any way or shape. This loops back to my previous post that roleplay games such as Adopt Me and Meepcity don’t require advanced controls and can dedicate 40% of their screen space to a thumbstick, but doesn’t work for advanced games and experiences aimed at older audiences.
If with ‘Action RPGs’ you exclusively mean top-down-isometric fixed-camera dungeon-style MOBA-like games that can be described as ‘button mashers’, sure. These games don’t require interaction with the viewport to rotate the camera or to interact with many items in the game world. They don’t tie in with the many social interactions possible in Roblox experiences that might require you to tap other player’s character or move furniture items in your house. Can you imagine what it would be like to redecorate your house in Meepcity if 40% of your viewport couldn’t be used to move furniture around? Surely the developer can disable the touch controls, but to the player there is no visual difference in having the controls enabled or disabled so this loops back to magic behaviour.
I’m not against change, I’m against taking away the option to use a perfectly functional, industry-standard proven input scheme and reducing developers choice of providing multiple input options to players, while simultaneously introducing vague ‘magic’-like input conventions that confuse players in interacting with the extremely varied range of experienced Roblox developers would like to offer players of all ages. Part of ‘moving the platform forward’ is allowing this wide variety of experiences to be made by an even wider range of developers, and removing a standard input method (and making it harder for developers to offer it by requiring forking) doesn’t contribute to that vision.
If this means that the removal of Thumbstick is being ‘dynamically’ (lol) evaluated, I’m sure that is much appreciated by all the developers who have previously brought up their concerns in this discussion. I hope that in these future evaluations, the more obvious result of ‘less players are using legacy Thumbstick because we’ve disabled it as a player choice’ won’t overshadow the pros of the legacy thumbstick that make it very applicable to certain unique creative experiences the Roblox platform is home to, even if they only make up for a small percentage of play sessions.
In my experience, the dynamic thumbstick can often be confusing, since the center of the thumbstick is always where you first put your finger down; this can get a little bit clunky, especially if you originally tapped on a bad position, or forgot where you originally tapped in the first place, causing you to take a second to look underneath your thumb. The original thumbstick, being symmetrical with the “Jump” button, had the advantage that you could leave a lot of control to muscle memory. It was just a lot more natural in general. So personally, I’ve always felt that the dynamic thumbstick was a clunkier control scheme
I feel like this approach to deprecating the thumbstick control scheme is a little disingenuous, given that the dynamic thumbstick was set as the default option without much notice (I must have missed the devforum post that originally announced it), and many developers (myself included) were completely unaware that they could even change the control scheme back. In my opinion, keeping the option for the thumbstick control scheme is the least that could be done.
That being said, I will very likely be implementing custom controls in my game to manage screen space and make the control scheme more intuitive on mobile. So whatever the final verdict is, it won’t really have an effect on my own games.
Personally, the idea of removing a control scheme on the basis of percentage of users, is asinine, considering one of the most popular games, Adopt Me, has a majority of users using dynamic thumbstick. And it’s also the game with a majority of Roblox’s playerbase.
Control schemes aren’t operating systems, so killing them off because robloxs biggest game accounts for most of Robloxs player base is a really dumb idea. And it doesn’t take much to make sure they work with each scheme added because most of the time, the central library isnt changed.
I appreciate staff responding to our concerns, but I still dont see why control schemes should be removed purely because of users appearing to not use them.
Jump Button zone - there is a touch zone around the button but it does not cover the entire space as shown in your graphic. As far as balance is concerned, I’m not sure why this is important?
The Dynamic Thumbstick shows up at first, when you start a game, along with a subtle dark section where the zone is, so players understand the thumbstick is available in that area.
A strong reason to have a zone where you can put your finger down to set the center of your thumbstick, is that people have different hand sizes and there are a lot of different sizes of touchscreen devices. Having a larger zone allows someone to comfortably put down their finger, which might not be where the legacy thumbstick is located. This is also somewhat true for the jump button (although you don’t normally hold this button down, unlike the thumbstick). We experimented with a zone for Jump but this made it more difficult to move the camera and wasn’t a great trade off honestly.
We made sure you can still tap UI, use tools, etc. in the DT zone so this shouldn’t interfere with interacting with items in that area of the screen.
Can you give examples please?
The good news is that we are still working on structuring the playerscripts so it will be easier to tune the controls and cameras going forward, so developers can fine tune their game’s controls.
This is great and helps to establish the convention that the thumbstick is located in that bottom corner. I didn’t know it did that at first but I found out earlier.
I strongly agree that increasing the area that can be used to spawn the thumbstick is beneficial for players. As you mentioned developers will be given more variables and ways to tune the controls going forward, and a way to customize this range would be helpful.
After playing around in a couple of Roblox games with the DT, and playing other mobile games that use a DT/Thumbstick like movement system, I found that there is one major issue that I’m having with the way the DT is implemented and how it differs from the classic Thumbstick which is the following;
When using DT, it is essentially a Legacy Thumbstick that doesn’t visually display how finger movement translated to movement direction and movement speed. There is no clear “thumbstick center” indicator that displays where the center of the thumbstick is (There is only a vague white line), and the lack of a circle around the center to indicate the thumbstick range/bounds makes it impossible to accurately control your movement speed.
This is where my concerns regarding usability, precision, and conventions come in. To name a couple of issues I’ve been having since I forced myself to use the DT as part of this PSA:
I’m trying to zoom my camera in and out. Naturally, I have a couple of fingers on the left end of my devices and a couple on the right side of my device. Bringing one finger on each side of the device in to tap and pinch towards the center of the screen, which is the convention used to zoom in and out across mobile devices, doesn’t yield the expected result of manipulating the camera. Instead, my left finger is hijacked by the DT which is extremely frustrating, and I can only imagine what it would be like for kids with smaller hands who cannot reach their fingers as far into the center of their device which is what I need to do to fix this issue.
I’m walking around in an indoor map with a lot of corridors, corners, and other ‘obstacles’. It’s fairly spacious but in order to navigate I need to know how my finger movements translate to character movements. I’m moving forward and want to turn the corner to the right. However, since there is no clear visual indicator of how my finger position translates to character movement direction, I find that moving my finger to the far right only results in a slight change of movement direction. It appears that the thumbstick center is in the far bottom of the screen.
I’m trying to walk around slower than the maximum Walkspeed by moving my finger roughly halfway the thumbstick. I find this extremely difficult to do as I do not know where this halfway point is. In trying to find out where to place my finger to achieve this goal, I’m constantly looking directly at the thumbstick but not having any luck because the only indicator is a vague white line and some dots.
Some games have tackled some of these issues already. They are using the visual style of a thumbstick, increasing the screen area that can be used to start (initiate) movement, and will “dynamically” move the center point as the players finger is moved further away from the initial center point to always maintain a clear convention of how finger position translated to movement direction (and speed). This avoids the need to constantly lift your finger off the screen and re-initiate the thumbstick to switch movement directions as well.
Brawl Stars, Archero, Fortnite and PUBG to name a few. All with different Thumbstick systems, but all maintaining the thumbstick conventions that communicate clearly to the player instead of offering a magic white line.
Ideally the Legacy Thumbstick and DT would be merged into a system that provides the improved accessibility of DT while maintaining the precision and conventions of Legacy Thumbstick. The current DT isn’t suitable for games that require more precise movement due to the aforementioned issues and reading that the Thumbstick will be removed because the DT is a identical or better replacement worries me. These differences and shortcomings are significant enough to not deem the DT an accurate enough input method when compared to Thumbstick, and removing Thumbstick / forcing developers to fork doesn’t seem like it will achieve the intended goal.
My friend and I had a conversation a long time ago Legacy Thumbstick sizes. We’d often joke about the Legacy Thumbstick having settings that’ll allow it to change sizes (Such as making it bigger or smaller.) Having settings like this was good more people who had different hand sizes or people who didn’t like the controls taking so much space. This would’ve been a slightly better solution then just removing it completely because the controls were “To small,” or “Less comfortable.” Like my younger cousin who’s IPad is really big that controls are far apart or hard to use could’ve changed the size bigger, Or like me who used a small phone for 3 years and wished the controls were smaller to have more space.
I agree. This is honestly a dumb decision on ROBLOX’s side. This update can get people to stop playing ROBLOX if they can only play on mobile. I know I’ve stopped playing games because of dodgy controls. What’s the point of ‘playing’ if you can’t control it? I think people are only supporting this because, they either like DT or they haven’t played mobile themselves so they don’t realise how annoying certain controls are (Touch to move, DT, etc.).
Ok, so roblox can remove studio, just because it is change. All changes arent good. And also, why you give us reply permission on anouncments, when you are ignoring, when we say, that something isnt good idea.
I would say that many Players were very much and maybe even many New Mobile Players would be very much Attached towards Legacy Controls, the very reason being that you can easily view and control a Joystick which I believe many people are Quite Familiar with. Though this has now become pretty old, I would say it was the best and an All Time Control Mode.
The current movement system doesn’t really appear as a joystick or you know basically something through which you get that Typical feeling Of Controlling Your Character and randomly if you just move the screen to view your surroundings your player starts moving, which a lot won’t like.
this new thumbstick does not work well when the game forces portrait mode (like natural disaster survival which is basically unplayable in mobile), it is difficult to rotate the camera with the right thumb as mobile players usually are accustomed to since the thumbstick area becomes the entire lower area of the screen, including the right side, resulting in thumbstick inputs when players are attempting to move the camera
