Hello! I’m a developer and a Roblox player for around 4-5 years, and my internet connection is terrible, to the point where it can take an hour for heavy roblox games to load, and I wanted to ask.
Is there such a thing as “asset optimization”
Because games like Funky Friday claim to have somehow “optimized the loading of assets” which sounds weird, since I cannot see any improvements in loading time, is this just marketing? Or is it something that is available as a tool for developers to use, if so, how do I use it?
I am not sure how you can optimize while not changing anything visually, is it something to do with the scripting? Audio? Images? Please, if you know anything about optimization on Roblox.
To understand how to optimize your assets, you first have to understand why assets take so long to load.
When you join a game, the client (you, your computer) must download the assets before the initial Roblox loading screen goes away. Your internet has a download speed and an upload speed. Depending on how good your internet is (you can purchase better internet!), your speeds will vary.
Here are my internet speed results. You can test yours here. The number that I’m going to be focusing on is download speed.
Two important notes:
Mbps stands for megabits per second.
One megabit is roughly 125 kilobytes.
In the image above is a simple part with a texture on it. When I download the texture onto my device and check its properties, I can easily read how much kilobytes the texture is.
This singular texture alone is ~5.8 megabits (732 KB / 125 = how much megabits it is).
Using a free online image compressor, I can reduce unique colors in the image and extremely reduce kilobytes. It went from about 6 megabits to under 1 and the texture is virtually the same looking.
One the left is the unoptimized texture (about 6 megabits) and on the right is the optimized texture (under a megabit).
They look completely the same but now I saved ~6 megabits of loading time. While this doesn’t seem like a lot, these numbers can add up if you optimize all your textures. If any of your players (which includes yourself) have bad internet download speeds, I really really suggest optimizing images.
This doesn’t just apply to textures. You can optimize audios (not entirely sure where you’d do that or if it’s easy), MeshParts (export it as a .obj file and look at how much KB it is, reducing tris will reduce KB), UnionOperations (do the same as meshparts then reimport it as a meshpart), etc.
Unnecessary high-res textures are the silent assassins.
Alright, that sounds like a good explanation, thank you for explaining it, I have a really bad internet connection, 1 mbps download, 0.355 upload are my average results, at best its 3 mbps, nothing I can do about it, it is simply the best available in the area, but this explains why it takes very long for some games to load, I guess you can only optimize so far with textures and models.
I’d probably just suggest getting slightly better internet. If that isn’t a possibility for you however, stick to using Roblox materials and stay away from decals/textures and high tris MeshParts.
