Another great studio update by Roblox! First the baseplates, then the orientation indicator, and now the CanTouch property!
Keep up the great work, Roblox!
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How much of a performance gain is there for BaseParts with CanCollide set to true but CanTouch set to false?
It can simplify your Touch event filtering.
Let’s say you have a car game with cars made of ~100 parts each. Maybe you have a Part on the car with a touch event listener for processing vfx when the car hits obstacles (maybe there’s more than one!). Let’s also say there are several other cars, but none should collide with one another (ie ghost racers).
Without CanTouch, whenever cars move through each other there could be 100+ touch events firing on each car. You would need to manually add logic to the touch event connector to filter out those parts and still take the performance hit of 100 touch events.
With CanTouch (and Workspace.TouchesUseCollisionGroups), you can easily filter out the parts you don’t want to fire touch events, without adding more code.
I don’t think there are use cases that absolutely necessitated this property, but it can significantly simplify things.
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Setting CanTouch to true for a part with CanTouch set to false which is within another part will cause a crash in both studio and in-game 100% of the time:
Expected behaviour:
Behaviour after CanTouch went live:
Repo open-source place:
https://www.roblox.com/games/6166477769/ZonePlus-Playground
This will significantly impact games with ZonePlus that utilise zone.partEntered and zone.partExited events:
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If you want an object to be completely ignored in .Touched events, this new property is a much better solution than creating a global ignorelist table.
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Thanks for the report, investigating now.
We have disabled this for now due crashes in certain cases. I’ll post here when it’s active again!
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What can I expect in terms of performance optimizations for a game where literally every single object in workspace is Anchored and non-CanCollide? This also includes things like humanoid character models – literally everything is Anchored and non-CanCollide. I also don’t use any raycasts, region3’s, etc; humanoid state is set to not do anything. I also move every single part in workspace with one BulkMoveTo batch CFrame update call.
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This could’ve been really handy several years ago! My friends and I ran an experiment back in 2014 with two identical cars: one drove and the other flew. The flying version generated measurably less lag because the wheels never came in contact with the ground. Putting this level of control in our hands opens intriguing possibilities.
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Wasnt this already usable in scripts for a long time?
Yeah but it didn’t do anything until now.
thank god now i dont have like 999 errors in my output
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Does/Will this also apply to terrain? There are touched events on terrain too since it inherits from BasePart and large-scaled terrains can definitely cause performance lag.
I can definitely image large terrain without detecting touched events faster.
I am pretty sure Touched events work with terrain, I’ll test again when able to
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Terrain inherits from BasePart and should therefore have this property as well. It should work the same.
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Does this mean if you set CanTouch to false during a Touched event, the event function abruptly end then? Or will it finish?
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It will improve performance if both CanTouch and CanCollide are false
Yeah, but some BasePart properties apply to all parts except for Terrain (such as Anchored, CanCollide, Transparency, Color and etc), so will this property work or not?
I recommend disabling the Touched event if the CanTouch property is disabled. It’s most likely to not impact the server’s performance, instead of throwing an error.
Did you try both and how was performance difference?
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This is an amazing feature! I am no longer needing to use THAT much of debounce for my scripts, thanks Roblox!
If you disable CanTouch in a Touched Event it will disconnect the event so the print doesn’t get read.
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