In the games I create, I tend to prefer very large, open maps. Most of the games I make are battlefield-style war games, which often have fast moving trucks and planes. Giving these games a large map, like 15,000^2 studs allows for a more fun, immersive experience with vehicles compared to a game that crams the whole battle into a 2000^2 area.
Before smooth terrain took over, the old 4x4 voxel terrain was great for this. It was destructible and was literally designed for high scalability and use for large maps, which is talked about here: https://youtu.be/i29JIiiQ4OU
Making large maps with the old terrain was easy. However, smooth terrain sacrifices scalability for detail, and a 3000^2 stud map made out of smooth terrain is bordering the memory usage and performance limits.
With the old voxel terrain gone, I’m looking for an alternative to make performance friendly large maps again. Has anyone else had experience with this? If so, what did you use to create your maps?
If you don’t want to use roblox generated terrain, the alternative would be to make one yourself.
Whether its done via meshes or simply by building it with bricks in studio. However bricks won’t help performance issues at that size, even if they do help with the “destructible quality” you mentioned.
Neither of those ways are very time-friendly either so that is also a downside of making a map from scratch. However most larger maps on high-performance games tend to be made via meshes.
There are plenty of terrain generation algorithms and tools that you could use in conjunction with Blender. You could take the results and slice them up into more manageable squares and load into Roblox, then arrange them together.
Bonus points if you devise a way to reuse chunks of the map to save on memory and load times, since Roblox only loads a mesh once.
Not sure how nicely the meshes will handle collisions with vehicles though.