ViewportFrames are a great tool that save developers time when making inventories, as we do not need to manually screenshot, crop & upload images. However, as inventories collect many items, this requires a client to download and store more items with an increasing memory footprint as the models cannot be deleted.
This means that in order for a client to show an image of a model, they must also download the model. This becomes increasingly problematic for games with lots of items, or games that have high-partcount models like cars, houses, etc.
(Icons above had to be created in Photoshop, as realtime viewport frames would be too intensive)
How can this be improved?
Being able to render these on the server and then send an image id to clients would be a fantastic solution to this issue. This would also allow for player creations to be easily shared through thumbnails, rather than downloading entire models. This could be a special imageId that only works in that specific game, so it does not need to go through moderation.
Alternatively, if the server cannot perform a render, being able to dynamically create imageIds from studio using ViewportFrames would allow us to automate the process of creating images for items!
Anyways, this 4.2k Instances are totally unnecessary to have as I don’t move the models around or anything like that. I use them as static images in the game and most importantly, they are cloned every now and then in the game and repeatedly. Is not like those viewport frames remain under the 384 cap.