Add a way to toggle Android status and navigation bars at runtime

[sosasees]

Describe the project you are working on

a game with

• pre-game menus
• a pause menu

Describe the problem or limitation you are having in your project

i want the status bar and navigation bar to hide during gameplay so they don't distract me

but i want to see the system bars during the menus so i can quickly check battery status and switch apps

— user story

the first part is done because the system bars are hidden by default.
but i can't do the second part because i found no way to toggle system bars in GDScript

Describe the feature / enhancement and how it helps to overcome the problem or limitation

adding GDScript methods to

• show system bars
• hide system bars

would make it possible to solve the user story.

making separate methods to

• toggle status bar
• toggle navigation bar

would be even better because then games could also

• show navigation bar and status bar if the screen is tall enough
• show navigation bar but hide status bar if the screen is not so tall (a lot of Samsung apps do this in Landscape mode)

Describe how your proposal will work, with code, pseudo-code, mock-ups, and/or diagrams

the GDScript methods would be:

• OS.set_status_bar_visible( bool value )
• OS.set_navigation_bar_visible( bool value )

to improve readability of the system bars, we could also set their background color (but that's out-of-scope for this proposal, and as a workaround we could always place ColorRects behind the system bars):

• OS.set_status_bar_color( Color background_color )
• OS.set_navigaton_bar_color( Color background_color )

If this enhancement will not be used often, can it be worked around with a few lines of script?

i believe not:
i asked 1 time each across 2 Godot forums and no-one could answer
(no longer official forum, official forum)

Is there a reason why this should be core and not an add-on in the asset library?

this will benefit all paid games (and many free games) because they all have pre-game menus and a pause menu

[syntaxerror247]

@sosasees You can try my Android Plugin System Bar Color Changer, It has the functionality to change system bars color and enable translucent system bars.

Currently you cannot toggle them seperately but you can use DisplayServer.window_set_mode(DisplayServer.WINDOW_MODE_EXCLUSIVE_FULLSCREEN) to toggle immersive mode.

[llama-nl]

Probably, In Godot 4.4 this feature is implemented with this PR: godotengine/godot#96208 (comment)
@AThousandShips please check.

[AThousandShips]

Someone relevant to this topic would be better to ping than a random maintainer, please don't ping random people

[syntaxerror247]

Probably, In Godot 4.4 this feature is implemented with this PR: godotengine/godot#96208 (comment)

Haven't I said the same thing in my above comment.
Quoting from PR:

The new Android immersive mode logic is hooked to the DisplayServer#window_set_mode(...) and DisplayServer#window_get_mode(....) apis which means that game logic can also leverage the new functionality to query and toggle immersive mode at runtime on Android

That time, I have only kept this proposal opened because it also asks to provide an option to change the system bar color at runtime.

[syntaxerror247]

@AThousandShips We can close this proposal now. Few weeks ago, I have discussed about the color part with m4gr3d and we agreed to not implement this because it will be android only and easily doable with plugin.