How many meshes on a map are too much?

Help and Feedback Building Support
#1

Hello

I’ve been working on a spawn map for my upcoming game recently, and I have been making almost all of my models in blender because I prefer blender to the Roblox building tools. But recently I have been wondering if I am going overboard with all of the meshes that I have been using, almost the entire map in this picture is made up of meshes except the paths, the squares in front of the shops, and the grass itself. Almost all of my textures I just make 32x32 to save on memory. They’re all low poly and I have set the RenderFidelity of almost all of them set to Automatic

MapSoFar
MapSoFar1269×591 314 KB

So do you guys think I am making too many meshes? Or should it be fine? Or would I need to implement a loading screen?

I also plan on making 4 or 5 more maps that will have a similar amount of meshes.

Thanks

8 Likes
#2

Discussed before, mainly dependent on the game performance which can be seen visually. If you can see lag, you may want to reduce the mesh amount.

#3

The problem is that I have a decent PC and I can’t really tell if it would lag badly for people on lower end devices. One of my old games had people reporting lag and I was unable to find the source of it.

#4

Meshes are basically just parts that need to load and cache. So you need to think about how crucial say a part is to the game and whether they need to see it immediately. Now the performance overall on a mesh part isn’t that bad compared to normal parts and is mostly dependent on the amount of vertices. If you have 500+ different trees (meshes) in the same area then this is a problem, the user needs to both load and cache all of these different trees and that’ll cause you the lag compared to having 3 trees the user needs to cache for those 500. It’s worth noting mesh parts still suffer from inaccurate hitboxes.

TL:DR; Mesh parts need to both load and cache, so think about memory on how many of these unique mesh parts you need and the amount of vertices each one has. Having the max amount of vertices on each, for 500 different unique meshes all within the same area can cause lag.

Edit:

Try messing with the collision factor of the parts and maybe invisible parts to represent the physical hitbox for these complex meshes. Should take down on the physics lag, but as I stated it’s mostly the amount of vertices and how many unique cached meshes you have. You could also have old scripts and different things causing the lag and it may not be the parts.

4 Likes
#5

Thanks, and for making future maps in this game, would it be a good idea to remove all of the maps from the client and then just make them load them whenever they want to travel to a map? Or is that not a good idea?

#6

It’s a good idea to only have the areas needed loaded in and load them in as they go along, no need to have the entire map loaded in if they are only going to see 5%.

1 Like
#7

There is always a compromise. You can maximize your graphics quality to see if more lag is visible, or check the performance statistically, and possibly use a lower-end device at home.

#8

You could also ask if anyone has a low tech device they could test it out on for you.

#9

I have a relatively low end computer that I could use to test it out

#10

in blender it self have a feature that you can use to optimize meshes for your game, before you upload it to studio, first select a mesh that you want to optimize then next go to edit mode then on the upper side menu select “Mesh” > hover over the "Clean Up then select “Decimate Geometry” then change the ratio to what ever you want as long as the mesh looks good. Additionally, you can check the Triangles of a mesh by just clicking the arrow down on the “Show Overlays” and select “Statistics”. hopefully this helps