As a Roblox developer, it is currently very time consuming to make low-detail meshes for models that should be low-detail all the time, such as 3rd person view models in a 1st person game.
I think it would be really nice to give developers just a little more control over the LOD feature for meshes. Currently there is only Precise, and Automatic. But for quite a few situations it would be extremely useful to be able to manually set a mesh to the lowest or maybe the medium LOD.
Just adding a couple more Enums to the RenderFidelity property for these manual settings would go a long way in my book.
For example, in my current FPS project I have first-person weapon meshes that are in excess of 5k polygons, and in order to make sure the game runs efficiently as possible, I make much lower-detail meshes for the third-person weapon models. This is very time-consuming, and also doubles the amount of meshes I need to store. Now that Roblox automatically makes these lower-detail meshes, it would be really helpful if I could access them.
Our trees are not too high detail, we’ve managed to cut them down to around 1200 triangles per model, and 2 materials. With 8000 trees (in our unfinished world, so we plan on having more), that means that the engine is trying to render 9.6 million triangles. This is a huge waste. But LOD’s come with their own set of issues:
This is unsightly. We want to change the distance at which trees show their LOD, so it is less visible to the user.
Unrelated, streaming enabled should un-stream objects or Render distance should be able to be changed independently of render quality. But these are topics for their own discussion threads.
Currently it is very hard to have good looking mesh trees with textured leaves without it turning into an ugly tree from a what I think its a very short distance before the mesh starts unloading triangles.
Here’s an example of how they look right now (looks like a square) from a short distance in my opinion,
Me and many other developers would like to have more control over this feature, or for the mesh detail unloading distance on max graphics to rise a bit more.
My suggestion, is that we could have an option in the Game Settings that lets us set how far players can see the mesh fully loaded on max graphical client settings before it starts lowering the triangle count, or for the feature to get a higher loading distance before it unloads the meshes further away.
