This bug can be found in almost every game in which is using smooth terrain.
Reproduction would be to have smooth terrain in the distance of the camera, it is a lot more visible on thinner layers of smooth terrain.
Expected Behavior
I would expect the rendering engine to represent the smooth terrain in less voxels, and maintaining color on edges. Instead the engine removes the voxels and the engine renders the edges improperly.
Actual Behavior
Notice near edges or height variations, from a distance, the texturing and shading becomes completely horrendous.
Issue Area: Engine Issue Type: Display Impact: High Frequency: Constantly
Mind you, for this bug report I am not complaining of the level of depth system in which ROBLOX uses for smooth terrain; while it could be better- it serves it’s function.
This bug report is specifically on the rendering issues in height variations, and the seams that are made; as can be seen in the screenshot in my original post.
Somewhat related, if you move towards these seams very quickly, sometimes they don’t unload fast enough and you’ll see 2 layers of terrain. This happens very frequently on lower end devices when you are moving past terrain in my experience. Common examples include basically any game with driving.
I sure do still have this issue on my larger terrain maps and flat ones. And also it would be cool if we could set how much ram to allocate to roblox since one of my games seems to max out at 4GB (I have 32GB in my system) maybe in the settings page or set as a percentage of their ram like 25% but no less then a certain amount, say 2GB.
Just a heads-up that we are aware of this problem and are tracking a ticket internally.
Also note there are actually 3 problems here: (1) terracing (i.e. the “smooth” terrain not being smooth) (2) this being way more prominent in further LODs and (3) streaming bandwidth limitations causing further LODs to be visible up close, so this becomes even more prominent.
Out of curiosity, alongside building off of this, is there any future plans to optimize terrain in terms of memory? Currently every single terrain voxel is stored in memory, for large scale terrain this is extremely performant intensive and can make games take upwards of minutes to load. Is there future plans to optimize this? Large scale maps are effectively impossible with smooth terrain.
