So, me and another developer have been trying to make a platformer game recently. We thought that making a game out of just Roblox Studio won’t be appealing. So we are trying to go on blender (I’m trying to learn it too) so we can make it more attractive to users.
The issue is the infamous lag. Most people with low-end devices for sure are going to have trouble playing the game. I need some options down the comments to solve this issue…
We have thought of making it (meshes) into StreamingMesh. Of course, we didn’t perform any action yet because we did not create any assets, we are just planning out the game’s development. Although, StreamingMesh might reduce the quality of the game so it’s one of the last resorts we want to go through!
When it comes to raw-triangle count, meshes (if done properly) are generally much better optimized that trying to build the same thing using parts. This is because it is possible to remove useless faces, such as faces that are inside of the object.
The big thing to keep in mind when making meshes is how much a loss of geometry will affect the silhouette of the mesh. Say that you had a cube with four faces on each side. You could easily merge these faces so there was only one face per side without affecting the silhouette of the cube. However, if you tried to further reduce the count your cube would become a triangle, which clearly would not work.
In Blender, you have a couple of modifiers that can help you. The Decimate modifier will iteratively remove unnecessary geometry from your model, while keeping the polygons reasonably neatly arranged. You can also use a Limited Dissolve operation which will merge faces that have too small of an angle between them (In basic terms, trying to keep curves but removing excess geometry in flat or near-flat areas).
Another thing that I did not mention, you should keep in mind when reducing your geometry like this to avoid n-gons.
N-gons are polygons with more than four vertices making up a face. Because you have much less control with this kind of geometry (the computer has fewer input values to define where to put the triangles, I believe), and because they tend to make ugly shading, they are not ideal. Also, the Subdivision Surface modifier does not work well with them.