Hey Dev Forum members,
I was just curious, with steaming enabled on, how much parts can a game have? A game being worked on by a friend of mine started out at 10k parts to 50k to a 100k, 250k and now 300k, and neither of us feel any difference in performance from 10k to now.
Which makes me curious, is their some limit on this? And if so how far can we go? Is a few million parts possible?
A few million parts is possible. However, I do not recommend it. Having millions of parts may slow the game down, cause glitches, and it will be harder to manage the game. It also really depends what game your are building, and if that few million parts are necessary.
Not as big as you think. Before you even consider streaming, a giant map is going to use a lot of memory when it’s open in studio. As someone who deals with that a lot it’s really annoying.
There’s a limit to how big a place file can be too. Roblox will give the infamous “Bad Allocation” error if you publish your game and it is too large, even if it seems fine in studio.
Theoretically, you could generate a huge map client-side, but this would require your own workarounds for the issues above. And you would have to make your own streaming system because streaming enabled wouldn’t work with such a concept. This would probably work best for something like Minecraft that has procedurally-generated terrain in chunks, but I’m sure you could use some tricks to generate a whole premade map.
In terms of smooth terrain, My map is approximately 15,000,000 studs. Or ~2,000,000,000 voxels. And it works fine across multiple devices. It does have high memory usage… but generally Roblox will start unstreaming objects at that point. It’s a balance on how much of what is unstreamed effects your game.
Parts are instanced, most parts… depending on how you use textures and materials. So that saves a lot of memory as well. A game with a lot of humanoids, or a lot of meshes with many different materials will probably have a lower threshold for how large it can be.
My game is a Naval type game, so I needed a large ocean. It’s a pirate game, so I need a lot of NPCs. And that’s what I’m working on right now. I haven’t tested them combined. But so far it can handle around 120 NPCs with Humanoids in a Place without Smooth Terrain. Granted the Humanoids are client side.