Introducing Support for Platform Avatars in SLIM

[crusherfire]

I believe most issues relating to fast clusters were already addressed:

Making Avatar Rendering More Performant

Hi Creators, We are excited to announce that we have made substantial performance-focused improvements to FastCluster and Layered Clothing rendering systems. This should resolve some long-standing issues with player avatars causing framerate drops in your experiences. While the FastCluster improvements outlined below are active immediately, additional optimizations for Layered Clothing will go live in early 2026. Note: in the context of this post, an avatar is a Model with a Humanoid or at …

[crusherfire]

@gumziii

if Streaming doesn’t work for you, we’d love to talk about what reasons you have for not adopting it

I think the two biggest issues with instance streaming is:

1. Performance issues
2. Design issues

It seems like performance issues are being addressed already, which is nice:

Streaming in/out causing massive lag spikes

On my game, i have a large map with detailed buildings and locations, and I utilize streaming enabled to reduce memory and optimize the experience, however doing this causes some massive lag spikes when streaming in or out parts of the map, causing for a very unpleasant experience, meaning i cannot utilize streaming. Repro file and steps are contained in staff message Expected behavior I expect streaming in and out parts of the map to be smooth and not heavily impact my framerate. A pr…

The other issue is simply needing to design code/systems around objects that could potentially stream in or out at any moment.

Usually the best approach I find it just throwing observers everywhere using CollectionService tags, but that ends up meaning I need to figure out good ways to optimize code because the setup process that would happen when a client first joins could now happen any time for objects that are scripted and stream in/out.

Sometimes I’d rather just have a static reference to an object I need, do the setup, and be done.

Though I’ve heard that a QueryService is in the works, which may help with the design pains around dynamic instances:

QueryService: A Unified Querying Solution

Coming soon under Server Authority!

edit: and one more minor annoyance is that there is no :IsPersistentLoaded() method

:IsPersistentLoaded() method

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to determine if a client received all persistent models with instance streaming enabled. We have the event PersistentLoaded which fires when a client receives their persistent models, but no way to check if they were already loaded. I have a module loader, and I’m attempting to implement a feature that waits until this event fires on the client-side to ensure it’s safe to index for persistent models without having to yield. But because there is n…

[sinanxd]

nice, but workspace is starting to get too many settings

[FauconFR_01 (fries)]

@MikkelDevs

that’s not what the majority of the community wants

Who wants this?

• Yes, I want this.
• No, I do not want this

[timbekip (Fish)]

if only this existed for r6, the accesorries use so many triangles

[DanielxdSBlol]

This is one of the best updates since avatars weren’t able to do such things with streaming enabled before.

[zythdotdev (Zyth)]

What a misguided comment. Extra performance is ALWAYS welcome.

[XenoDenissboss1]

This is uh… Cool? I understand to get more performance you have to trade something for it but in this case it should not be, yknow, more performance. Theres pretty clear stuttering whenever those avatars are being loaded in/out along side the avatars themselves just snapping in and out of existence. It does not look great at all.

I’m not sure whats the idea behind spamming the client with gigantic packets and having it on the fly generate different models. SURELY these are things that can at least be baked once by the server/client, no? I just cannot wrap my head around these “performance benefits” that cost you more performance. To be honest, i would prioritize cpu perf OVER gpu perf when it comes to avatars, not whatever this is. Sure its great that you can run so many characters but like… the overhead either way will be worlds higher on the cpu due to physics and everything else related to humanoids.

[MikkelDevs (Mikkel)]

@Ziscore

Just extremely flawed to suggest a claim on the entire community considering the one fact that an incredibly small fraction of players ever interact with any media while the vast majority lurk

And that’s just how sampling works - you can never really get everyone’s opinion, but what you can do is get a reasonable consensus of what people want. Only 1% of people creating posts doesn’t mean we can’t reasonably assume that the majority of people, for example, was against the plus requirement to publish games, which Roblox has now reworked.

You’re focusing way too much on the semantics; my main point is that a significant portion of users do not like Roblox’s recent push for realism and fidelity (especially coming at the cost of old features, like classic faces), and that there are highly demanded features that Roblox could be putting their money and resources into instead.

---

My first reply was too vague that it made some think i was only criticizing this individual update. What I was really trying to do was criticize Roblox's higher level priorities that many devs here also do not agree with.

[sayer80 (sayercito)]

Set everything to Persistent Models

[Fouxelefr (Fouxe)]

Doing this is highly not recommended by the roblox documentation.

[sayer80 (sayercito)]

Yea, but he wants Slim without StreamingEnabled

[azureusFrog]

Hello, this bug should be fixed now.

[DinoWattz]

It’s been quite a while since I first noticed this issue. The SLIM versions of avatar models tend to have their accessories flipped backwards and also completely ignore changes made using the Accessory Adjustment feature, as you can see below:

• Without SLIM (live client, zoomed in)
  
  
  
• With SLIM (live client, zoomed out)
  
  
  

I’m hoping this gets fixed before the opt-out phase

[Fe_ct]

Had to disable SLIM in my newly released game due to it not playing well with my character morphs (using ApplyDescriptionAsync) and also misplacing back accessories

Instead of behaving how you’d expect, it instead maintains my original avatar but turns it into a skin walker

Oddly though if I reset it does show the morph

[centraltrains]

This is not ready for prime time. Enabled it in Bloxy Bingo yesterday to see if it would help with a report of increased lag on low end devices following an update where players are now more dense, and it lead to lots of visual appearance bugs:

Speicifcally:

• Tools (bingo markers) were not showing for LocalPlayer’s avatar (although they could see everyone elses) (we insert them from server into player character on seated).
• In some cases LocalPlayer’s accessories became misaligned once seated.

We are a slightly more unusual game having a high player count in a relatively small open area, so most of the performance issues are likely coming from increased avatar count where as on our previous map we had it split into two rooms.

I hope these issues can be fixed as we defiantly did see reductions in crash rate in the ~24 hour period it was enabled for.

[gumziii]

Hey, thanks for the report!

We’ve figured out the related issue so hopefully local avatars should be fixed relatively soon

[SamsonXVI (Samson)]

can we get r6 support for this?

[alperenalperen12 (Alpeeen)]

One additional thing apart from misaligned accessories I noticed (and this took so long to debug that it was SLIM causing this) is any client movement like dashing or sprinting would cause the character mesh to be drift away from the HRP and then snap back.