Optimization when having tens of thousands of parts on screen at the same time

[HollowStreak (Hollow)]

I’m making a game that requires tens of thousands of parts on the screen, but it understandably lags a lot. Is there any ways I could optimize while keeping those parts as existing objects?

[kbflatt]

How many of these parts are visible? If some parts are not visible to the player then they can just be removed. You could also attempt to unrender all the minor details when the player is at a distance. If you are using unions you are going to want to convert them to mesh’s and use the performance option(this slowly deforms the mesh as you get further away and reduces the triangle amount.

[Scottifly]

Have you looked into StreamingEnabled? With it you can set the limits of what is shown to players.

[HollowStreak (Hollow)]

I’m making a large amount of dots that create an image when shown from the right angle, but they start lagging whenever i try making it higher detail. I can’t really do anything like that cause its being dynamically created unless theres some method i dont know about.

[HollowStreak (Hollow)]

They’re on screen so I dont believe that would work sadly. It helps when I’m looking away from the objects but sometimes that’s unavoidable.

[Scottifly]

Is it like a wall of Parts at the same distance, or parts at many different distances?
Parts at different distances can be removed using StreamingEnabled to help with lag.

Here’s another thing to try. Turn off the CanTouch and CanQuery properties of the Parts to see if that helps with lag.

[HollowStreak (Hollow)]

They’re at different distances so that could work! Do you know a good place to look into using StreamingEnabled? Also I’ll try turning off CanTouch and CanQuery cause that could definitely cause issues

[debugMage]

Disable: CanTouch, CanQuery, CanCollide, CastShadow.

Make the parts have SmoothPlastic as a material.

You could also benefit from Voxel lighting and of course StreamingEnabled.

This may be old information, but you should definitely give it a try if you’re into tinkering with weird methods: Give the parts Neon material but make their color black (or grey) to the point where they have no glow. Supposedly it’s faster than SmoothPlastic, but I’ve never tested it myself.

[HollowStreak (Hollow)]

Would having bloom all the way down so neon doesn’t glow work? cause I need it to preserve the color of the parts. Also I’ll do all this and see how much it helps! Also also I realized I cannot have canCollide off as it’s another way of saving on part count by not letting parts overlap.

[debugMage]

Yes that could help. You could look at some of these micro-optimizations, they may be helpful. It also has a bulletin about what to do with Bloom.

@boatbomber

Removing 3D and Physics Work

This project is UI only. There is no physics, no 3D world, no characters to run around. That means it should run fast as hell. However, the Roblox engine has no concept of UI only games- so we have to do our best to minimize the impact of the pointless 3D work that is done in the background.

• Hello darkness my old friend:
  We set our lighting to the simplest possible- voxel tech, no shadows, all black color values, and brightness 0. This reduces some lighting work.
  We add a Sky, with no celestial bodies or stars and all the textures set to a single pixel. This saves us from sending the big sky and moon textures to several drawcalls.
  Adding a BloomEffect with Size 0, Intensity 0, and Threshold inf actually lets the engine skip the entire Glow step on the GPU.
• Floating Point:
  We set gravity to 0, making it so that there are absolutely no forces in play for the physics engine.
• Empty inside:
  We do not spawn in characters for the players, and the world has no geometry. There is nothing but our minimal sky.
• Narrow minded:
  We set our 3D camera FoV to 1, the lowest it supports. This way, we’d render only a tiny sliver of the aforementioned sky.
• Blindfolded:
  We set our camera CFrame matrix to all zeros, causing the camera to render pure black as it is distorted down to nothingness.
• No thank you:
  Roblox injects default scripts, such as camera controls, character controls, chat, and more. We override these by replacing them with empty directories or (in cases where we can’t override) by destroying them on startup.

Although some of these may seem insignificantly small, our frame times are merely a couple hundred microseconds at thousands of FPS and therefore they really do matter.

[HollowStreak (Hollow)]

This helped a lot! It actually also helped me realize a massive lag causer in my code cause I was using a for loop to check if any of the parts a new part was touching was in a folder to delete it to save on part count but removing it made some of the big lag spikes go away completely! Thanks a bunch!

[Scottifly]

If you want to look up any Studio item go to create.roblox.com and Search there.
You’ll find links like the one I already gave above. It also describes the Properties of the items.