I’m developing a medium-to-large city map for a Roblox roleplay game designed to support 40-50 players at once. Each player can spawn one vehicle at a time, and I’m aiming to keep the map and vehicles as optimized as possible to ensure smooth performance. My main goal is to determine an acceptable polygon count for each vehicle to avoid performance issues, given the map’s scale and player count.
What is the issue?
I’m creating realistic vehicles for the game, with polygon counts currently ranging from 20k to ~100k polygons per vehicle, with most vehicles averaging around ~60k polygons. These vehicles are not stored in-game but are inserted via InsertService, and I’m using StreamingEnabled to help optimize the map. I’m concerned whether this polygon count is too high for a server with 40-50 players, each potentially spawning a vehicle, and how it might impact performance on a medium-to-large city map. I want to ensure the game runs smoothly across a variety of devices, including lower-end hardware.
Are these polygon counts for vehicles suitable for my game’s scale (~60k polygons per vehicle)?
Instead of increased polygons have you tried baking a texture into the model for the details?
That’s going to be a lot of strain on device graphics trying to keep up with gameplay. Imagine the load if 20 players decide to drive at the same location.
Take a look at similar games with decent realistic vehicles. They may give you an indication of how much detail you should go for, and look at how the vehicles appear to be built.
Thanks for the reply! Just to clarify, are you suggesting baking textures onto lower-polygon models to maintain detail? I’m aware of this technique, but I’m not sure about the most practical way to do it, especially since baking textures for all my vehicles would be very time-consuming. That’s why I’m trying to find a reasonable polygon count range to target when downloading/optimizing models.
Currently, I’ve been downloading models from SketchFab since they provide triangle counts before downloading. After that, I optimize these models as much as possible for Roblox, including reducing texture resolutions to 512x512 to save up some memory. For the vehicle exteriors, Im using Roblox’s MaterialService with predefined materials because I have a vehicle customization system that lets players change the body color, finish, wheel color etcc. I only apply textures to a few exterior parts, and internal parts of the vehicles to keep things semi-realistic (because I have a first person cam for each vehicle).
That’s why I’m wondering about the ideal polygon count for my vehicles (what I should be aiming for) to avoid performance issues
I’d suggest taking a few models from SketchFab (or wherever) if you can, stert with a high poly count and then one as low as possible (maybe some in between if available) and put them into a test place. See what each looks like. You may be surprised at a vehicle with much lower tri numbers looks like.
Any decrease to the load on the user’s device will help. Also remember that a lot of people are playing games on phones and tablets. If you test in on a high performance PC and it works flawlessly with no lag it may be almost unplayable on a low end phone. You may get some dislikes because of it.
It allows you to change the texture’s colour or metallic properties. Basically create a single texture for your car and make colours and surface appearance customizable.