My game can no longer be published because it has too much terrain

[NocturneRyan (Ryan)]

Hello! So, for the past year I have been working on an open world game. To say that it’s been in development for a year, however, would kind of be a lie considering I constantly restart everything with new models or landscapes because my skills keep consistently improving and I want to output the best I can do. Just recently I have discovered a very efficient way of creating detailed custom heightmaps to import into studio so I’ve been using this as a method to produce wide landscapes to construct on. At this expense, I have encountered an issue with performance, as to be expected.

https://gyazo.com/1841461654846c0f04ec7a644498c31a
This is an overview of our map. It is 23727x23727 studs. As you can evidently see here the land is not finished being sculpted but this is because I have halted development because of this issue.

The place takes several minutes to load in Roblox Studio. It takes roughly a minute to autosave. I really don’t mind these waiting times, it’s to be expected, but I can no longer publish the place to Roblox. I have read through and thought about several different plans and ideas (mostly being using teleportation for the map space), but I really want to have everything saved under one place if possible. The drive of this game is that I really want to revolutionize the open world experience with Roblox. I’m especially pushing for this because I know Roblox is planning to improve client performance to produce large scale games in the coming months along with terrain improvements.

Is there anything else (besides enabling streaming enabled) to help improve this? If I have done what I can by turning this feature on, do you agree that it would be plausible to wait and see if Roblox’s updates will aid this? If you’re unsure of what I mean specifically, putting focus into large scale games such as increasing player count and mesh/part count was presented at this year’s RDC. You can also see such updates planned in the 2020 road map, but we’re all aware how unstable the roadmap can be.

Any help at all would be appreciated! Thank you so much from me and my team!

[3rdhoan123 (Future Noob)]

Stressing the engine to fit everything into one game isn’t a really good idea, yes it would be nice if everything was located in one place however, taking stress off for all players to be able to enjoy is a far more (in my opinion) better idea.

Games like Vesteria and Arcane Adventures (rip) do a similar method of splitting the world into chunks. Although World Of Magic is the “successor” to arcane adventures, it does take sacrifice in loading times as you may see if you’ve tried playing the game since it attempts to put everything into one place.

[apenzijncoolenleuk1 (Apenz1)]

A thing you could maybe try is to have the bottom of your landscape flat instead of following the hill structure on the bottom, since players wouldn’t be able to see that anyway. I think I remember reading somewhere that terrain was very optimized and the roblox engine automatically handles the inside of the mountain (solid) for you… Should be worth a try?

[leo007er1]

Did you tried to enable content streaming? (if you want more informations here)
Another things that will help is removing the terrain you don’t see. What I mean is to remove the terrain under the map and make the map thin like this: