Update on Legacy Chat Deprecation and TextChatService Migration

[poopgamer36522 (Extraoton)]

Most of this post is still kinda confusing and unclear in some areas, like are we allowed to keep custom chats with textchatservice api or will that also get removed in april? Are there gonna be full gui customization options for the textchatservice or are we just stuck with the ugly default look? And much more

[ItSilverTheHedgehog (Silver)]

No, i will never migrate to TextChatService, as it is an useless and stupid chat service that nobody needs. I do not agree with these changes and I will refuse to migrate to that ugly new text chat service. As a 2017 roblox user, I do not agree to these changes and i do not wish to migrate in my game.

Forcing us won’t help. I will find a way to bring back the Legacy Chat System on Roblox. No matter what. I do not let me forced by a stupid company that doesn’t care about their community.

[be_nj (benjj)]

You are allowed to make a custom chat, as long as the messages route through TextChannels and not a custom remote event thing.

Edit: More specifically: Usage Guidelines | Documentation - Roblox Creator Hub

[ColRealPro (Kohl)]

so like, you guys gonna fix the performance on the new chat any time soon? this is the 1 reason I will be holding back on it as long as I possibly can

[rsisted (quacksisted)]

Hi, I don’t agree with this update,

First of all, Most older games rely on Legacy Chat as their developers may not be on roblox anymore or are banned. This change could potentially break older games that use older and deprecated Legacy Chat functions.

Second of all, LegacyChatService has a more imaginative feeling to it. The newer service looks extremely corporate and it just looks like an design to attract more investors.

Third of all, If Legacy Chat is so outdated, then why not use the exact same CoreGui, and rebuild the older system from scratch that includes the Parental Controls Feature.

Overall this is just my opinion on this, I think most developers would like Legacy to stay up, so maybe just update Legacy to the newer features.

[RabbyDevs (Rabby)]

Hey, is there any chance that New Experience Controls Chat Button has unannounced breaking changes would be fixed? It’s been causing me a lot of trouble lately, quite the combo when you couple it with Script_CoreScripts/ExperienceChatMain Very Slow.

[poopgamer36522 (Extraoton)]

Are we still allowed to use remotes for stuff like custom admin commands and chat logs since i feel like its a lot more simpler and probably performance wise better

[HealthyKarl]

I wonder if the customized chats will get put in a folder when auto-migrated and replaced with the standard new one.

[bigtheangry]

Roblox, I cannot switch to textchatservice unless you add the ability to offset the ui from mandatory positions

this post highlights my problems

forcing it is fine but ur not even giving us any options for the base ui

Custom positions for TextChatService

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to make the new TextChatService chat window fit into various UIs, as there are only a few preset positions that the chat box can be placed. If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I would be able to use the new TextChatService in more varieties of UIs and locations. As an example, if you were to have menu buttons coming down from the top left of the screen, the chat window would currently block i…

[tnavarts]

@poopgamer36522

and probably performance wise better

There’s no reason to be concerned about the performance of using TextChatService as a foundation for chat. Things like the memory expense of assets making up game content / perf expense of physics sim are much higher than that from a system which only has to process the occasional packet of text.

There’s some fair concerns about the performance of the built in UI built on top of the TextChatService but that’s a separate concern from moving to the TextChatService API as the orchestration point for chat.

It’s not the TextChatService itself that’s making things slow, it’s issues with code built on top of it which can be improved without changing anything about the TextChatService API, we won’t end up being stuck with poor performance because of TextChatService.

[ItzAidfoplays390]

@Roblox

We’re also working on improving the performance of TextChatService as well.

We need actions and results, not just words and promises. We’ve been getting multiple confirmation messages that the issue is worked on and multiple messages about patches getting rolled out, yet with almost no results. The issue is still here and predominant, and it’s so easy to notice ExperienceChatMain having huge lag spikes in many experiences on different devices. It’s a huge shame that this issue is still unfixed after around two years of being reported.

[poopgamer36522 (Extraoton)]

Some people seem to worry about TextChatService performance so just asking to be safe, what about the other use cases that could be simpler, because in my case I have been playing around with chat system admin commands and some of them get tagged for no reason, so I cant quite use it to register commands run by users and even so if it registers I want to be able to log the untagged message to an external app through http service without it being full of hashtags

[LvieReal (Lvie)]

There is no reason for chat to cause lag spikes

[skeliphant]

The problem is that if you completely disable chat entirely, it still runs in the background; so replacing it does not fix this issue.

[Mauio64 (Mauio)]

Sound logic, but in practice, the new chat system is in fact taking up more CPU usage than every LocalScript our game has combined, including all of the other CoreScripts.

Script_CoreScripts/ExperienceChatMain Very Slow

In the hangout game On Tap, we are noticing that the CoreScript ExperienceChatMain is taking a lot of CPU time on the Heartbeat event. On the Meta Quest 2 and my BlackBerry KEY2 (Snapdragon 660), the Heatbeat event is taking 15ms to process, and nearly 9ms on my AMD R7 3700X desktop. This is a very significant part of the CPU frame times considering the Meta Quest 2 currently gets 50ms-60ms CPU frame times currently. This screenshot is from the HTML view from my phone: [chrome_i57T7pHUrs] Th…

EDIT: Noticed you edited your message to include “UI implementation”. Well, as it stands, disabling that doesn’t remove the performance issues either.

[RabbyDevs (Rabby)]

Ah yes, 171 ms to process the “occasional packet of text”. Very performant, clearly I should not worry about this.

[ItzAidfoplays390]

We shouldn’t but we’re forced to. ExperienceChatMain constantly shows up on the Microprofiler as the reason behind the huge lag spikes that could occur in experiences. It’s the number 1 reason for the huge lag spikes and fps drops that I get in experiences personally. I have no idea why sending text messages requires huge amount of resources, or why would a chat system causes huge lag spikes, or why would it still take resources and actually take huge amount of resources when disabled. All of these questions can only be answered by Roblox staff.

To be fair, ExperienceChatMain isn’t the only Corescript that suffers from performance issues, most Corescripts do. They usually all use more resources than developer scripts. It’s kind of hypocrite to encourage developers to do their part on optimization when Roblox doesn’t at all.

[XenoDenissboss1]

I dont know man… I would agree with you by not carrying what UI does to performance compared to physics or rendering. Except all of these new interfaces and ui’s crammed onto us have been nothing but a direct downgrade (performance and customizability wise).

The entire chat system stutters when trying to do ANYTHING. Opening the chat, starting to write, adding/removing characters, ANYTHING!!!

The micro profiler screenshot is my 14700k sending one letter using the chat system btw.

[LvieReal (Lvie)]

I’ll say that Roblox core UI in general is the real reason all of the games I make and optimize myself still lag

Mobile players also suffer from text chat being unusable

[XenoDenissboss1]

@tnavarts

It’s not the TextChatService itself that’s making things slow, it’s issues with code built on top of it which can be improved without changing anything about the TextChatService API.

Okay, what is it then? What “code built on top”? And how is that code not related to the TextChatService? The GUI itself is slow, the functionality of sending messages is slow, everything about it is slow.
Magically if i switch to the legacy version, all of the performance issues vanish! I’m guessing that the old chat system doesn’t use the magic new “code built on top” but still seems to do the job just fine, no?