Most of my players are experiencing this UI flickering bug. It happen on everything UI related like ScreenGui, SurfaceGui and BillboardGui. It also happen on all platform and devices.
In our game, players are placing a lot of card pack on the ground and they can see a BillboardGui on each of them. For that reason we have a short MaxDistance on them but it seems like its still affecting the UI Rendering even if most of them are hidden by the distance. In a game where there is not many Pack on the ground with thier BillboardGui, the problem is not happening.
Expected behavior
the Rendering should skip the GUI that are hidden so that problem dont happen.
Hi @ThePoinball , it looks like what is happening is that there are too many different glyph combinations (text size, font, outline) to fit into the glyph atlas. The result is this flickering, as every frame new glyphs are requested and replace old ones that are still used.
I’d be happy to take a look at this experience to see if there is anything we can do in the short term.
Otherwise, we have a longer guide written by one of our UI engineers on how to mitigate the problem here: All About Text - Best Practices
hey, Thanks for your quick answer. Its exactly what I was suspecting. We will have to Destroy the BillboardGUI of all the Other players pack to prevent that Issue to happen.
Its a bit Sad that the Max Distance can’t Unload or Untrack them from the UI Rendering System. 90% of those GUI are Hidden from Max Distance and are still Causing that Issue. The only way I found to unload them from the rendering is to Destroy them.
For me, the max distance setting is kind of useless. I was expecting it to exactly prevent those issue from happening.
I got you an other example here. I’m recording that on PC btw where I believe the Memory for font and UI is higher.
I also notice that it happen more often more time we spend on a highly populated server.
Hey, Letting you know that I released an update today removing all the packs UI on the ground from other players pack and it didnt solve the issue. the UI still glitch after spending more then 5min in the game.
I hope you can find the problem! Thanks for your precious time!
So we’ve previously made changes to how billboard guis render so they don’t typically fill up the atlas. They aren’t causing the problem and you can easily add them back. In this case I think its a combination of:
Large number of SurfaceGuis visible at onoce
Large text on each surface gui + large stroked text
At a minimum, I’d recommend something like a max distance for the SurfaceGuis.
We’ve explored taking the billboard gui text technique and also applying it to surface gui, this might be a good test case for that.
Hey, I have a max distance setup on all my SurfaceGui as well. You think those distance are not short enough? I’m only using 1 font in the entire game.
I also noticed that the problem happen more when we interact with the UI by scaling it. Is that normal?
Here a video of my mouse going over the buttons :
Oh I just noticed that the problem happen when I have players around me with a lot of cards in their Giant Binders. So those Giant cards might cause the problem.
If you can still see the text, it means its still being rendered - and will still take up space in the atlas. Yeah any text takes up size proportional to how big it is. Big UI text takes up more space.
I dug in a bit more - while we have an optimization for billboard UI, it only kicks in above 36 font size. You have a lot of text that is just below that size, so we use the old technique.
I will look into adjusting that down a bit next week, that should help some.
Hey @ThePoinball . I’ve rolled out some small configuration changes, otherwise we’re currently waiting on a bugfix to make its way to android. Stay tuned!
