As a Roblox game developer, you understand the frustration that lag can cause for both you and your players. Lag not only affects the performance of your game but also detracts from the overall user experience. Fortunately, there are several effective strategies and techniques that can help reduce lag in your Roblox games.
1. Use Scripting Techniques:
Minimize the use of loops and heavy calculations.
Optimize your code by avoiding repetitive calculations.
Use efficient data structures such as dictionaries or arrays instead of unnecessary tables.
Avoid excessive use of wait() functions, as they can slow down the game’s performance.
2. Optimize part count and complexity:
Reduce the number of unnecessary parts in your game world.
Use simple collision shapes instead of complex shapes where possible.
e.g. prefer to use Box or Cylinder instead of MeshPart
3. Optimize lighting and effects:
Minimize the number of shadow-casting lights.
eg.
Use low-resolution or optimized textures for materials.
eg. in game.MaterialService you can change low resolution textures or you can remove new 2022 textures
Reduce or disable unnecessary visual effects (e.g., particles, bloom, or ambient occlusion) when not essential to the gameplay.
eg. you can make it black for disable it
4. Streamline physics simulation:
Limit the number of physics-enabled parts in your game.
eg. coming soon!
Use constraints sparingly and optimize their settings.
eg. coming soon!
Adjust the physics simulation timestep if necessary, but keep it within reasonable bounds.
5. Limit network usage:
Minimize the amount of data sent between the server and clients.
eg. Datastore V2
By implementing these strategies and staying proactive in addressing lag concerns, you’ll be able to create smoother-running Roblox games that provide an enjoyable experience for players while showcasing your skills as a talented developer
You can also utilize Paralell Lua to use multiple CPU cores at once for large calculations. This visibly improved my FPS in my game, when I thought it was just roblox studio being annoying. I now raycast and run other long clumps of calculations in paralell. This inspired other improvements to make my code more efficient.
Hopefully in the future, we’ll be able to use GPU cores!
A good guide in general, however, one thing has ruined the whole guide for me.
Unions are in general worse than parts, I think you are mistaking part count for triangle/face count.
Unions have more complex geometry than other BaseParts, which can drastically reduce performance (both due to rendering and calculating collisions).
UnionOperations are valid if you are using them properly, otherwise they will end up causing you more issues, and would become an inconvenience rather than a benefit to your game.
compatibility lighting is meant exclusively for old projects that haven’t updated to newer lighting technologies, and looks absolutely awful compared to them.
as far as im aware, the underlying voxel lighting (used underneath all of the modern lighting technologies) is baked during runtime as long as lights don’t move. performance issues relating to updating the voxel lighting are practically nonexistent.
the only technology that uses proper real-time lighting is future, which is automatically disabled on lower graphics settings and older devices anyways.
a lot of the points in this post seem like either micro-optimizations, bad advice, or just plain wrong advice…
Some of these are quite valid but missing out on the bigger ones like Parallel Lua. Micro-optimisations are fairly important too, as they can add up quite quickly.
Nice list I guess, but this would be a better resource if you could show how to measure a games performance with tools and suggest fixes for common lag issues evident in the analysis. Otherwise you’re just guessing at solutions and ‘fixing’ things that may not even be the problem.
Huh? Do wait functions actually reduce game performance? How so? Right now they quite literarily halt code execution until the specified wait time reaches 0. Adding a random wait between two sets of heavy calculations would just kinda switch the games framerate from nonexistent, totally normal and nonexistent yet again. Unless you’re talking about developers using said waits wrong potentially causing the game to have unresponsive features? Was this what you were talking about? I mean i guess this would be something but its not really about real game performance and more about the game just being unresponsive.
Um, how would you reduce bloom and ambient occlusion? Is there something i am missing? Right now the only way you could “technically” disable bloom is if you were to add a bloom instance and set its intensity to 0. This however would still not prevent it from rendering at all. Performance would not get impacted regardless, even if you were to use just less neon objects overall. Ambient Occlusion on the other hand is something that’s not even available at all to the developer. Only way to disable it is by just setting the clients graphical settings to smaller values. Something we also cant forcefully do.
Huh? But how? How are any of these going to change anything? They arent even related to Ambient Occlusion and bloom. All you’re really changing is some environmental theme colors to total black. The color black is not going to magically just make the game run faster in any way possible.
