Map size to balance performance and quality?

Hello everyone, I am starting fresh on a medium detailed city map shooting to be comparable to Criminality or better in terms of detail. I am curious how large I can get without sacrificing too much performance? I am hoping to make around 75% of the buildings have an interior.

My current approximate size is 1150 by 960 studs. Any feedback is appreciated.

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It all depends on the build style and how many objects you will have in your game. There is a big difference between the performance of a high poly game and a low poly game.

1150 by 960 sounds good, but if you seem to be experiencing some lag with that size; try enabling SteamingEnabled.

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Thanks for the reply, I will keep StreamingEnabled in mind if I experience any lag since I really don’t want to do any smaller than the current size if at all possible.

Also going to be trying to keep it low poly using mostly parts with some meshes.

I suggest not making the insides of your buildings heavily detailed. 75% interior buildings having high detail would probably be one of the main causes of lag in your game. Keep all the objects inside of the building low poly.

Also if you have any MeshParts inside the buildings (plants, chairs, literally anything) set all their RenderFidelities to Performance. If it’s something crucial to the game (like the vault door to the bank) then I suggest turning its RenderFidelity to Automatic.

If possible, disable CanTouch and CanCollide on everything that you can (good examples would be plants, super small objects that don’t need collision, paintings on the wall). If both are disabled, the object is ignored by the collision calculation system. (Also if it’s a MeshPart, and both are disabled, set its CollisionFidelity to Box)

I did create a MeshPart performance tutorial if you’d like to look into it, it explains everything above and more in better detail, however it’s really only useful if your game uses MeshParts. MeshPart Usage, Performance & Optimizations

Also general tip, don’t use the Roblox cylinder and sphere. They’re high tris and add up over time. Try to make low poly versions in Blender instead and enable Smooth Shading and you’ll have a performant and visually identical sphere and cylinder.


Edit:

Also avoid UnionOperations. I don’t think your game will ever use CSG editing so you don’t need unions. You can make a much more performant object in Blender.

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Thanks for the advice and heads up with unions, I used to make a lot of unions but have recently been just making the same shape with parts and not unioning to avoid high polys. I have also been taking steps to learn blender so that any complex shapes can be made there with much less tris than a union.

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