Afraid of necro-bumping a post that’s been around for years, but where there has been community tooling for measuring triangle count, they have either ended up broken or lost partial support due to APIs being closed off for platform safety reasons (most recently this)
With the client beta of in-experience editable meshes now out, it is really surprising there isn’t a native method to check the vertex/tri count, or memory impact of any selected part/mesh part yet. It is a very common metric provided by modelling software and even directly competing game engines. Making such a metric visible would help for many different use cases, and also would probably serve as a constant and clear reminder to new and existing developers to keep an eye on the weight and performance intensity of a specified asset, especially if the use of this was reinforced by guides in the creator hub on standard practice for assets.
The main use case of a polygon count is really simple. Currently, the standard of modelling across Roblox ranges from modeller to modeller, and assets can be anything from extremely performant to eating up client memory and increasing a scene’s triangle count. Some games that feature models in the latter category might want to become more performant down the road but with bigger studios and large games where the number of assets tends to increase tenfold and are much trickier to track and assess in Roblox Studio itself. Clear problem children assets that don’t scale well become harder to optimise because finding them studio is akin to looking for needles in a haystack, (or should I say wire-frame and render stats ). You could argue that we could try and remake every asset ingame so they’re performant, or adopt a performance-first strategy to development, but with new contractors coming in and a lot of different hands on a project, optimisation takes time that we can’t always fit into a weekly update schedule, time that ideally we’d want to use where necessary.
There are also a lot more instances nowadays of games transferring ownership and the new owner of a game wanting to make a game more performant. Another use case in this instance, of having read-only access to the triangle count of meshes would be that it enables the creation of community tools like the one linked above, which can help them assess the big problem children among the many meshes and assets uploaded to our games by utilising their triangle count.
This is of course also not mentioning the fact that many games still utilise meshes found on the toolbox. The Toolbox Search feature already has a triangle count filter. This is great, but most developers with budgets for drawcall or a scene’s triangle count need tangible numbers to work with, to ensure that these items still fit within their rendering budget. Creators also might be looking for singular meshes in a much greater pack, such as in an asset pack, but there is currently no way of assessing the value of an already-uploaded asset’s performance against another, without trying to export that into a blender or some weird hacks that really shouldn’t have to happen.
In my eyes, this feels like a pretty big QoL improvement which is absent at the moment. Wireframe Rendering and Render Stats are still great tools but for the scale and speed our team needs to work at, having triangle count per asset, readily accessible and common knowledge within Roblox Studio would make it easier to work quicker and more effectively while minimising time spent squirrelling away at finding assets in a game to optimise.