Performance Enhancing Script using Transparency

Help and Feedback Scripting Support
#1

Could you theoretically improve a detailed games performance if you made a script that set parts that weren’t visible to transparency = 1? If not are there any decent ways to tackle a rendering/performance enhancing script?

#2

There is almost no significant improvement to be gained by making non-visible parts transparent. They will still be simulating physics and events, and if they’re offscreen they’re not impacting your render times anyway. One thing Roblox doesn’t do I believe is occlusion culling. Parts behind other parts are still rendered iirc. Correct me if I’m wrong. Only parts beyond the viewport’s cone of vision are culled.

Sometimes developers will implement chunk loading, which typically unloads / stores unoccupied / unused areas of workspace somewhere to prevent them from rendering or interacting with anything. However, removing them from workspace has its drawbacks (just as with Streaming).

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#3

It’s not clear what exactly you’re suggesting by this:

  1. Not in the viewport
    Roblox handles this already.

  2. Obscured by something
    If Roblox handles this already, you don’t need to do anything. If Roblox does not handle this, you don’t need to do anything (the engineers know their stuff).

  3. In some other area according to a custom system of yours, e.g. rooms in a house
    This may be the kind of thing that a more sophisticated and customizable form of Network Streaming would be appropriate for, which would also give you gains in terms of reducing memory footprint. Note that this isn’t related to setting Transparency.

More generally, I would suggest that you try not to worry about using scripts to increase rendering performance in your game. You are not going to find simple, efficient solutions that haven’t already been implemented under the hood. Instead, considering following standard practices like reducing part count where possible.

However, there are two (currently unimplemented) features that you may be interested in. The first is automatic level-of-detail for Meshes, which is on the Roadmap for this quarter. The second is this request for a more sophisticated streaming system as mentioned in (3) above.

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