Upcoming changes to BillboardGui and SurfaceGui

An upcoming change will make BillboardGui and SurfaceGui behave as though they had ClipDescendants true. This change is to fix inconsistency in the clipping behavior of these objects. Right now, any GuiObject that is completely outside the bounds of a BillboardGui or SurfaceGui will not render, but if it’s only partially outside, it will. In addition, the client performs frustum culling of SurfaceGuis based on their viewport bounds, which will cause broken behavior for SurfaceGuis that render outside their bounds. This is a notice for developers to change their games to stop relying on rendering outside the bounds of SurfaceGuis, and also a poll to gauge how many games will break with this change.

This change will affect GUIs that use borders, because frames render their borders on the outside. A 0,0 - 1,1 frame will get its border clipped off. This behavior also happens with ScreenGuis, but is generally not a problem. I have tested a number of games and it looks like it doesn’t cause any problems. If your game does for some reason rely on borders on frames, they can be fixed using UIPadding to inset the frame or by using the traditional mechanism of changing the position and size.

The change will go live on or after August 9 (two weeks warning).

  • A part of my game will be broken by this change
  • The look of my game will be changed in some way
  • My game is completely unaffected

0 voters

14 Likes

A warning to @colbert2677 that SCPF may be affected due to the poorly made surfaceguis.

May want to look into this.

1 Like

You are proposing to make ScreenGuis clip their descendants? This is a problem because you wouldn’t be able to put anything under the topbar if it was clipped.

5 Likes

There should be no observable change to ScreenGui. I have specifically made sure that things underneath the topbar will still render. I was mentioning it because if you make a 1,1 frame right now the left, right, and bottom borders will be clipped.

1 Like

As in, it’s currently enabled? I made a 1x1 frame and the border is visible:

I mean 1,1 scale. It will be clipped by the edges of your display. Not with the changes enabled.

2 Likes

Thanks for the notification, I’ll look into it as soon as I can.

1 Like

Just to clarify, the clipdescendants property of ScreenGui objects will stay the same? There should be no change in the way ScreenGuis render, just surfaceguis and billboardguis? Just making sure as I have a number of screenguis in my games that use clipdescendants as elements of the UI are outside frames.

Any observable change in the way ScreenGuis work would be a bug.

1 Like

This change is causing several visual issues in just this game alone, I’d recommend that this flag is disabled then re-added as a default-off option (very likely that this will visually break legacy content).

![NO6DIjoMSTiEeM4c0jyFZA|395x163](upload://tfT9HjykAKG0dgXewA1XeSMmANI.png PM|624x500](upload://u6FfGLghV0nTItfVGippPVJ8n4J.jpg)

5 Likes

I agree, fixing my game was easy as all of the billboardguis I use need to be the same style and the same size, but with a game where there are many different uses for the billboard and surface GUIs this would be way harder to do.

Support

Yeah, having an issue where a lot of old SurfaceGui’s were made incorrectly, and this update messed up a LOT of them. Would like to have an option for this

Support

Flag has been disabled, will be looking into other options for shipping this functionality.

1 Like