I talked to someone at RDC yesterday about occlusion culling and learned that for the first release of this, it is not initially going to support terrain occlusion, either as occluders, or being occluded.
I understand that the technical issue of terrain as an occluder is complex, however, I think that parts occluding terrain is a much simpler problem (terrain could be occluded in chunks), and might be able to be delivered sooner.
It is very common for developers to have part terrain, and use exclusively terrain water, or compliment their part terrain with sections of smooth terrain, or have building interiors where smooth terrain is not visible at all, and I believe the value of releasing this tech early with parts able to occlude terrain (before terrain can occlude parts or other terrain) is very high. This is directly applicable to my game, as I use exclusively terrain water with a very large part-built open world.
I just wanted to share these thoughts, hopefully before everything is finalized and it’s too late to reconsider plans. I would hate for support for this to be lumped into complete terrain support and then needlessly stretched out into a year+ timeline to release.
I think releasing with parts-occluding-terrain is a reasonable requirement for the initial release of this feature.
Separately, I do have a concern over terrain not being able to occlude other terrain. I recently reworked my game Horse Valley to using terrain, and we have a lot of valleys where people will not be able to see beyond the enclosures. It seems really wasteful to not utilize occlusion culling here. If staff can answer this, what’s the expected ETA for this?
I believe the issue is the fact that terrain works differently here, occlusion culling culls entire object, not individual occluded faces. Doing individual faces is way too much work and would slow a lot down. Terrain is like in “chunks” of sorts? Like I don’t see it being majorly difficult I just guess they didn’t address this initially for the release of this feature. I didn’t ask about this exact issue at RDC so I’m not sure why it’s missing but that’s my closest guess? Since you can’t occlude individual faces like I said above, you’d have to hide the entire “chunk”. I believe it’s relative to the bounding box? They have to check how large the bounding box of the terrain chunk is and if it is on screen, then if it isn’t on screen hide it.
I agree, most time with roblox and i hate to admit it is if it isn’t added on initial release it’s very low chances it gets added at all.
If occlusion culling gets released as is it could be 2-3 years before we see terrain occlusion being added as seen with other features. Decoration was promised a higher life and hasn’t seen much improvements aside from wind. Clouds have been on phase 1 for the last 2 years i believe. hope this being a performance update doesn’t suffer from the same fate.
Roblox promised to release Occlusion Culling “over the next few weeks” after announcing it on RDC 2024 but it still didn’t. I hope that with this delay they would bring terrain occlusion support with the initial release. I also heard that it currently doesn’t support character occlusion either. I would be disappointed if they wouldn’t support terrain and character occlusion in the initial release especially with the delay in releasing the feature. Also I hope it would release before the end of 2024.
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