Hello everyone. It has been a long time coming, but we are officially deprecating System Menu in favor of the Ribbon Menu style with the goal of eventually removing System Menu entirely. This means that going forward, new Studio features will not be tested or supported in System Menu. New things may happen to work in System Menu, but we cannot guarantee it. We understand there are a number of developers who still use System Menu so we want to make sure that you know where we are coming from on this.
System Menu and Ribbon operate on such different bases that it is unsustainable to support both at once. With System Menu supported, every change has to be planned, implemented, tested, and maintained with the old style in mind. With the advent of Team Create, Studio now has to be tested with multiple sessions simultaneously. Add System Menu to the mix and the number of permutations of Team Create with System and Ribbon sessions increases dramatically. This takes time and effort all across the entire development pipeline, resources that could have been spent towards fixing bugs or adding new features.
System Menu isn’t disappearing just yet, but we do want to encourage everyone to make the jump to Ribbon as we don’t plan on System Menu being around forever. If there are bugs or problems with the Ribbon Bar that are preventing you from switching, we would like to get your feedback. In addition, if you feel there are things that System Menu can do that Ribbon cannot, please inform us. A smooth and powerful Studio experience is one of the best ways we can enable you all to keep creating amazing content and so if there are obstacles in your path we want to know about them.
Also, for those of you who don’t know and are still using System Menu, the Ribbon Bar can be customized for quick and easy access much like the older menu. In the upper left corder of Studio is the Quick Access Toolbar. Here you can put literally any Studio action you like, even plugin buttons!
You can also collapse the Ribbon if you need more screen space by pressing the ^ button in the upper right corner of Studio. Clicking on any of the tabs will temporarily expand the Ribbon if you need access to a hidden button, and you can always toggle the Ribbon open again by pressing on the button in the upper right again.
With SystemMenu we can select and use the color painting tool from the menu. In RibbonBar, we can add the Color Action as Tool and Color buttons to the Quick Access Menu, but they don’t do anything. Anything that uses dropdowns/etc (anything that’s not strictly a button) doesn’t work in the QAM.
There’s a UX issue with ribbon tabs. If I click the File menu in either RibbonBar or SystemMenu, the things I can click are a couple pixels away because the dropdown starts at my cursor. On the other hand, when I select a tab in RibbonBar, I have to move my mouse alllll the way to the left side of the screen to start using things.
It’s also a huge pain to customize the QAM because I can only select one item at a time in the QAM configuration. It’d be a lot easier to use if I could move multiple buttons around and also click+drag them instead of using the arrows. This is the menu I’m referring to:
To increase RibbonBar’s usefulness, I highly suggest implementing this which was spurred from Office 2013’s ability to configure the ribbon: Trello This would allow users to configure the RibbonBar to be most useful for them, making the ribbon a viable alternative for power users as well.
Officially support adding user plugins to the tabs would also be nice. Instead of shoving everything in the QAM, it would allow me to group my plugins cleanly and make use of the ribbon. Using the Plugins tab isn’t a very good option because I constantly have to switch between the Plugins and other tabs which takes forever.
There’s a bug right now that makes collapsing near-useless (for some users, at least).
Gfy
Mouse is slightly off. First I show that tabs work normally. Then I collapse them and try viewing them. They turn white but don't show the actual content of the tab.
https://gfycat.com/SingleTinyCowrie
The ribbon does not properly show when clicking on a tab for the first time when collapsed. If I click on a tab, then click another right after, the second one will show. This issue persisted through a reinstall.
Edit: I’ve noticed that the bug will not occur if a web view is open. If a place file or script is open the ribbon bar will not show, but if a web view is open then it will.
That gif/gfy was from less than 20 minutes ago. I took the gfy, then did a reinstall before posting. I still have the issue in the reinstall from < 20 minutes ago.
I like System Menu because everything is easily accessible; none of that tab stuff. The Quick Access bar is great and all, but it’s at the top of the screen and as Echo said, it doesn’t work for some options.
This is almost possible with the ribbon, but due to the UX issues I mentioned in my post it’s not viable. So close! But not close enough. Allowing ribbon tabs to drop down as menus might be a potential solution to the issue I mentioned though.
While it’s not a new bug or anything, graying out and disabling 90% of the tool functionality in studio just because a script is open is a major annoyance.
If disabling menus isn’t going to be removed then merging the contextual Script Menu tab with the Test tab should be considered, disabling contextually irrelevant buttons within it. I find I need to use the Test tab far more than I need the Script Menu tab, and as a whole bouncing between the two menus is a pain.
Building workflow has (IMO) always been terrible with the ribbon bar. I’m forced to set a million key binds (which really destroy the fidelity of testing games in studio) or I have to click between 3 tabs and maintain and list of plugins along the quick access toolbar.
The Home tab is currently more useful for building than the Model tab. The Model tab lacks the terrain and insert tools that the Home tab has. It would be much more efficient for users to have both the Insert and Terrain tools available on the Model tab, and just removing the Terrain tab unless more tools and features are to come for it.
Being able to create our own ribbon tabs and fill them with whichever tool groups we want would resolve 99% of the workflow issues I (and I’m sure others) have. Even being able to insert user plugins into the existing tabs would go a long way to improving UX.
We can’t use the Alt key in studio, binding it for plugins and game binds gets overwritten by this Option to disable the double tapped alt keyboard shortcuts on ribbon bar. As a whole I think studio shortcuts should be ignored if the user is focused on the game window in any test mode with a client. Finally being able to crouch and walk forwards without closing studio would be a blessing.
I always hated the RibbonBar… If they made it where you could customize the UI and whatnot, then it wouldn’t be so bad, but having to switch tabs between all the different tools I use is really irritating, and don’t say ‘quick access toolbar’, because as many have stated above, dropdowns don’t work with that.
As someone who exclusively uses ribbon: The low information density looks good, but at the same time it is restrictive to power users. One way to fix that might be drag-n-drop customization.
Excellent feedback everyone, we appreciate your candid responses. From your replies, here is what we want to address:
Fix all the bugs! Studio QA has been looking into the mouse offset bug. Please let us know if you come across any more!
Quick access interface. It looks like there is certainly room for improvement in configuring the quick access toolbar and we will investigate.
Custom tabs. While we have no immediate plans to address this, we understand that customizing the ribbon bar is important to you and we’ll be considering our options.
I think potentially switching the order of QAM and the tabs may fix the UX issue with ribbons where you’re required to travel across your whole screen twice to enable and then use ribbon contents.
I think a nice short-term solution would be allowing people to override the Ribbon Bar config with a Studio setting.
It’s always been possible to heavily customize it by editing RobloxStudioRibbon.xml, but because that’s in the same folder as Studio it has to be replaced every time Studio updates, and recently the launcher started replacing it with the default one if it’s different.
Interesting, as the only layout I have used primarily is SystemMenu. Primarily meaning 98% of my account’s 9 years of using studio. This will be a hard transition for a lot of us.
I’m lucky I ventured out to mod the ribbon a while back. I can’t imagine what it’d be like to find out feedback gathering had started only after the interface was officially deprecated. IMO the feedback gathering should have done a lot earlier so the transition could have been “there’s no reason for you to use SystemMenu anymore” instead of “we don’t want you to use SystemMenu anymore”. Regardless, better late than never.
