New Improvements to Streaming Enabled

[WheretIB]

@Hirumiro

As an aside, the code example for Player:RequestStreamAroundAsync() is wrong – it’s using dot notation instead of the proper colon notation for a method.

Thank you, we will fix the example in the nearest documentation update.

[SubtotalAnt8185]

@lolmanurfunny

Let us control replication on a per instance basis.

Yes, and let’s also allow functionality of clients to replicate certain instances to the server too. It’s been a pain to do so ever since experimental mode was forced.

I don’t feel like this could replace streaming, but it could probably be a feature.

[lolmanurfunny (lolman)]

@SubtotalAnt8185

let’s also allow functionality of clients to replicate certain instances to the server too

I’m not too sure how well that would resonate with Roblox as it’d most likely have many security implications, by design.

[SubtotalAnt8185]

The server would likely need to read this property to validate this, so obviously that won’t be replicated.

[TheModsterRB (Thomas)]

This was exactly what many of us needed in order to use Streaming Enabled. And as hoped it has made it more benefitial for our players. Quicker joining times, less FPS drops, being able to keep certain things loaded in that we need to. Just one problem…

Since we enabled Streaming Enabled, despite the improvements it made, we’ve been constantly experiencing disconnecting bugs. This is certainly down to Streaming Enabled, because this is happening to everyone including myself and my developers, and it never happened prior to us enabling Streaming Enabled. When a player get’s disconnected they get one of the two following errors:

Obviously, their internet connection is fine, and given that this happens to every player, this can’t be down to their internet. The error with code 279 only seems to happen when players are attempting to join, and only happens to the player in question. Error 277 however, the one that states to check internet connection, happens to every player in the server and they all get kicked at the exact same time. However, according to the roblox website, the server is still live and the players are still there. Thus I believe the server itself is crashing and nothing to do with the Roblox client.

If it wasn’t for these issues, I’d be fully using Streaming Enabled. Please could this be looked into, as it was quite disheartening to have this happen after waiting for a feature that we badly needed for so long.

[CorvusCoraxx]

@TheModsterRB

Thus I believe the server itself is crashing and nothing to do with the Roblox client.

What is the place id for where these problems are occurring?

[TheModsterRB (Thomas)]

I had to remove it from our public game because of the issues, as our players were finding it unplayable, but you can test it here. It only happens with a lot of people in a server at once though rather than just a couple of players.

Post edit: Link removed

[CorvusCoraxx]

@TwentyTwoPilots

One thing I’d love to see is the ability to hard-set the radius at which a model streams out. I could do a lot of memory optimization by forcing key models to stream themselves out at custom radii that fit my game’s needs. Example use case here would be forcing denser props like traffic signals to stream out at a tighter radius than the rest of my environment.

If you use Opportunistic stream out then parts and models will be streamed out beyond a certain distance, assuming the models are atomic and have part descendants.

[CorvusCoraxx]

@TheModsterRB

I had to remove it from our public game because of the issues, as our players were finding it unplayable

Can you share the place id for where it was enabled, so we can see if there are crash reports?

[TheModsterRB (Thomas)]

Yup, it was on here, I disabled Streaming Enabled about 4 hours ago and it was enabled about 2 days ago for the record:

Grand Continental Railways [BETA]

Thanks in advance.

[hhwheat]

This is the same issue as I have previously reported through private messages. The server memory crashing issue hasn’t changed since at least august

[TwentyTwoPilots (twonty)]

That’s what we’re doing (or will be doing) right now, I’d still like to be able to force elements I determine to be unimportant to stream out more aggressively. Opportunistic is completely untunable* as it stands.
Things like roadside foliage and props, street lamps, traffic lights, etc. are unimportant at great distances and could be streamed out significantly earlier than things like trees, the landscape, buildings, etc. Some kind of control, be it stud-based or percentage-of-current-default-streamout-distance, would be immeasurably helpful and would let developers like me take control of what players see when, and would allow us to greater optimize our experiences.

I don’t want / need a solution that involves Roblox saying “trust us, we’ll do it all for you!” because invariably it’ll only be 30% of what I need and it’ll take years for the solution to be brought to the level of usefulness it would’ve had from the get-go if it had even an ounce of fine-tuning I could do.

[TeamSwordphin (Phin)]

Not related to the developer you are currently replying to, but ever since enabling streamingenabled, a place of ours within the experience has also been crashing with StreamingEnabled with similar error codes like 279 or 17. It has been happening since October so hopefully, it will also have some crash logs that can help. Even disabling everything and having just terrain and some blocks will cause it to crash sometimes.

PWNED: Aeternae Memori

[CorvusCoraxx]

@ProphetOuw

Tools that I equip to a player’s character delete themselves as soon as they’re equipped, this broke my game and I lost ~5K concurrent players

Idk if this has a relation with the new update but all my guis just deleted themselves

Can you file a bug report and provide a repro place? Are you using the features described in this post?

[CorvusCoraxx]

@TheModsterRB

Yup, it was on here, I disabled Streaming Enabled about 4 hours ago and it was enabled about 2 days ago for the record:

Grand Continental Railways [BETA] - Roblox

Thanks in advance.

Can you send me a private message so we can discuss the problems you encountered?

[CorvusCoraxx]

Please don’t report issues not directly related to the APIs described in this announcement to this thread. This is not meant as a place to report any issues encountered for experiences that happen to be streaming enabled.

[PeZsmistic]

This is an interesting idea, but very micro-optimizey. It would be preferable IMO if Roblox could estimate model streaming cost and dynamically adjust the stream out distance instead.

[Polyhex]

This is a wonderful start. We’re VERY close to an ideal StreamingEnabled workflow IMO.

Built-in selective replication would be a perfect addition to these settings. Something similar to PersistentPerPlayer, but players not added to the list would not stream the model at all, while players on the list would consider it persistent.

[mott0m]

Anyone else having issues with the Collection Service/Tagging?

When I set Model.StreamingMode = Atomic the collection service is not setting up my touch events any more.

CollectionService:GetAttributeChangedSignal('Resource'):Connect(setupResource)

[CorvusCoraxx]

@Ax3nx

Edit 2: Upon further testing it seems that putting a model with StreamingMode.Atomic in anywhere other than workspace that is accessible to clients will cause it to to never replicate to clients

@scriptruntime

Is it normal for Persistent models in ReplicatedStorage to simply disappear when the client loads? They seem to be visible on the server in my game.

@Nekoparaiten

Setting the ModelStreamingMode in StarterCharacter inside StarterPlayer to anything that is not Default and Nonatomic will for some reason remove all of the GUIs in StarterGui in-game. I’m not sure if this is intentional but it’s pretty annoying. The work-around I’ve found for this is setting the character to Default and setting the streaming mode to a desired mode after like a second after the player’s character load through code.

We have enabled a fix for the issue where models outside of workspace that used Atomic or Persistent would not be sent to clients. You should now be able to set the ModelStreamingMode on Models outside of workspace, such as in ReplicatedStorage.