I haven’t built much for actual use in games for a few years so I haven’t had to think about this, but since I’m doing a lot more lately I’ve been wondering how you’d get an idea of how many bricks is appropriate for what you’re doing.
Obviously, the fewer bricks the better, but how do I recognise when one structure has too many?
There’s a few factors, like size, detail, purpose etc but I can’t figure out what number of bricks is good vs bad.
For example, I’m building a lighthouse. Currently, it’s on 430 bricks. Is that a good number? What would be too many?
I guess what I’m asking is how many bricks can be reasonably handled by an average computer or what I should aim for with certain sized projects?
I’m sorry if this is phrased poorly, I can’t think how else to ask it!
Thank you
EDIT: additional question, should unions ever be used to reduce brick counts? I use them occasionally in builds to line up textures but I’m guessing this is bad for actual games.
Brick count really should be determined on what the game is about.
if its first person shooter where you need to milk all that performance then i would not go for more than i don’t know about 4000 bricks per map , if its more slow paced round based game like some minigames where you dont really mind sacrificing small performance i would go for about 7000 (you may not even need that much) , and if you are making a showcase and don’t mind performance then go all in on making builds look good.
Art/build style: If you’re building low-poly, you’d naturally have a lower partcount than building in high detail.
Game type: Like what @bachovar123 said, the partcount really depends on map size or the pacing of the game.
Audience: If you expect that your audience will have mostly low-end PCs (logically speaking, a game costing several thousand robux will have higher percentages of players with higher end setups and more disposable income. It really is hard to know, though, so polling your community will often be the best way to find out what general running capability players have) then you should use lower partcounts.
How much do you care? This sounds really odd to put so bluntly, but a lot of developers want to make a game that meets their personal expectations and quality concept. When I build (normally in higher detail and partcount) my focus is less on whether or not lower end PCs or mobile can run the game, and more than it gives the feeling that I’m going for with the project.
Do take my advice with a grain of salt, as I said in the last point this is rarely a high focus for me.
Do not exceed 5,000 blocks within a 1000,1000,1000 stud radius unless u dont mind lower end devices lagging however 10,000 blocks in that radius will lag all devices
Do not use unions unless they are moving / scripted parts
If you need to see where your game is having physics based lag do consider using the micro-profiler
Explanation: When you have an excess of parts, all that happens is it increases the loading time, it doesn’t necessarily decrease player performance. If you follow these conditions you can definitely stretch our the amounts of parts you use in your game:
Conditions:
Not crowding your parts in the thousands into one area, this’ll overwork the player’s ability to render. Please try your best to space them out accordingly or heck, even turn on streaming enabled if your game is incredibly part concentrated and large enough where this’d be effective.
Not using unions to cut down on gross part count, this does the exact opposite of what you think it does.
Exceptions: However if you have an excess of moving parts, then no, that’ll heavily decrease player performance.
Measuring the Competition:
Jailbreak Part Count: 19,000 - 20,000
MadCity Part Count: 25,300 - 25,500
MeepCity Part Count (Mobile Champion): 13,500 - 14,000
Conclusion:
You can stretch out the part count as far as you want, there’s a lots of ways to do so and still keeping it performant. However if you’re doing any type of standard build or commission where you don’t want to implement this amount of effort, the 15k - 30k range is optimal.
Don’t worry about lag if you’re creating a map—Studio can hold approx. 20,000K+ parts w/ terrain to my understanding, without any decrease in performances.
Good = doesn’t lag on client, server, and in-game. Bad = does lag on client, server, and in-game. Even though this specific question is not hard to solve, I can understand why you asked, but I would say it’s this simple.
430 is literally nothing, if you go up to 10K parts you won’t even find a difference.
Already solved.
Notice: All this information is limited to my personal experience. Pro-tip: Studio performs much better when Roblox and other softwares (ie Blender) are closed.
From my experience with part count, the kind of parts you have makes more of a difference than the number. For example, higher poly count shapes like cylinders and spheres cause far more lag than simple rectangles. I have found in builds with almost exclusively cubes and rectangles, the lag is very reasonable. On the other hand if your build features spheres and cylinders heavily, the lag can be far worse. A good method I have to test if there are too many parts is to select the whole model, then move it around with the move tool. If it moves smoothly, you’re good, if its somewhat choppy, consider cutting down on the part count.
