Questions regarding large terrain maps

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#1

Hello,

After “finishing” (beta) my first legit project in March and taking a short break, I am entertaining the idea of a much more ambitious game. My first game required me to learn nearly everything at each aspect, and this will too as it takes it up several levels of difficulty.

I’d like to create a large and lively map similar Valheim or Ark. Not quite in pure scale or size, but in terms of how dense(?) it is with life. Lush foliage, rich environment, dense forests, animated grass, etc. Of course I know this might not be fully possible due to performance constraints, but how close could I get while keeping it relatively easy to run? What techniques/features could I use to allow players to minimize lag, such as turning off animations, removing grass, etc? I am not an advanced developer, but if there are meaningful tricks and techniques I’m willing to learn.

As I don’t have very much experience with Roblox to know the best options, I have to rely on you guys for the advice. Is this best done with bricks, terrain tool, both, or something else? My last map was made purely of bricks, so I don’t have any experience with anything else.

Do any of you have experience creating such a map? Any tips you could give me? Any do’s or don’ts, or anything you wish you knew when you started?

I am sure I have more questions and I know I rambled, but I am just spitting this out as I go. Thanks for reading and thanks in advanced for any tips and help you all give me.

#2

Terrain can be quite heavy but it’s doable if you optimize it properly. Roblox terrain requires a hefty amount of voxels to be created so one way to remove unnecessary voxels is by removing terrain parts that are not visible by the players, this will reduce the map’s size as a file and how much computing power it will take for a device to load it.

Now as to how you can reduce the lag. Best way to get this outcome is using StreamingEnabled although please be careful while using this since it requires modification’s to scripts! You can find a lot of information related to this online so if you follow the tutorials you should be good to go.

Based on my experience with big terrain maps, try not to go over the 64MB limit. Normally, maps can’t even reach 20MB but if you are willing to use Roblox Terrain and aim for a large map I would guess that your file size would be larger than normal. My map was uploaded at about 65-66 MB so I think it’s safe to say 64MB is a good goal.

#3

Regarding this part:

To give you an idea on how effective this way, this entire space used to be full of terrain aka voxels that players had to load and the size of the file was at around 130MB but once I removed them it dropped down to 65MB.