Roblox is bringing in client side crashes for... HD default pants

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to optimize my game’s performance for lower-end devices when Roblox brings in default clothes at 5.333 MB. The less client side memory at any given time, the less likely devices are to crash, and crashes are bad since then less players are able to play your game. This is extremely apparent when it is or is not a problem based on crash statistics image

I have been working on my game optimizing textures for quite a while now, trying to reduce the memory usage on the client so that old phones and other lower-end devices don’t crash as often. As I was doing a recent check on live servers to find the largest assets and see if I could optimize them, I ran into something I didn’t even know was an issue at play, Roblox’s own assets.

One of the times I went into a game, I screen-capped the memory usage, found 1 asset Id of mine that only was used on a special event during runtime, while another was a default Roblox clothing item. Who needs 5.333MB of HD pants to be the default?

If Roblox is able to address this issue, replacing default clothing they upload with lower resolutions, while not looking much worse, it would improve the memory usage statistics for every single game that allows custom characters, this would bring down the crash rates and boost the playability for all such games.

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Uses 1.661MB:
https://www.roblox.com/library/321738372/graffitishirt5
https://www.roblox.com/library/321738870/blackshorts

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Decided to download the three clothing textures to investigate.

I’m not quite sure why the clothes in the reply are so high. Downloaded they’re 234 KB and 143 KB respectively, but it could be a matter of something I don’t know in terms of how the client handles the textures. I do know that a character’s avatar is compressed into a single texture, which does complicate things more. I can’t really provide a clear answer there.

What I CAN provide somewhat of a clear answer on are the GenericGirl2_Pants. All shirts and pants uploaded are to be uploaded at the scale of 585x559. You can’t upload any other resolution, or it errors out.

That is, unless you’re Roblox, using some odd work-around. The pants are over twice that, at 1219x1165.

Big Pants Texture

Here they are shrunk down to the proper resolution for comparison.

Small Pants Texture

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