Hi everybody. I am trying to make a game with a lot of details, but I would like to have as few lags on the phones as possible.
The artist insists on adding his own materials (about 20 megabytes) to the game, in addition to the models themselves.
I’m afraid that this is a lot of weight and the game will hang heavily when loading locations. I would not like to have to load more than 6 megabytes of models and textures in total at one point on the map.
Does anyone know whether all materials will be loaded immediately upon entering the game or only when details with such material appear in the radius of visibility (I use a system that loads models only within a certain radius from the player.
How many triangles for rendering and megabytes for a single download are acceptable so that players on weak phones feel comfortable in the game?
Materials will try to be dowloaded immediately and irrespectively of any chunk system, which rather helps with limiting the vertices and textures to be rendered in a shot. If you overdo the textures a functional problem that may occur is UI loading in too late (supposing you textured your UI), which could make some buttons invisible and discourage the impatient players. Other than that the implications are not so vast, I’ve noticed, under the condition that you don’t stamp your textures too excessively. I think 20 mb is too many, though, given that’s around 25-30 textures. There doesn’t seem to be a need for that number since there are some smart ways to make multiple uses of a single texture. I’m talking about blending it with roblox base materials by reducing transparency. It’s something I always use and recommend it strongly, as no matter what texture you have, if you simply plaster it onto a part the result will look artificial and plastic because you can’t (thus far) mess with subsurface lightscattering unlike roblox materials. As for the triangles the impact still depends mostly on how many are in the shot. For instance, I once worked on a game with an immense amount of triangles and textures and if you travelled far enough to see the entire map it would take seconds for a single heartbeat, but if you looked away it was smooth as a butter. I will estimate you shouldn’t exceed an arbitrary number of max 20 mb per entire place because only my more detailed projects that I aim towards PC and console users do.
Edit: apparently beta features are publishable now so you can mess with depth by adding heightmaps
PS. don’t do smooth terrain water. Smooth terrain itself has quite nice potential for realism but the water is very impact-heavy and I recommend replacing it with Foil parts.