I’m going to be building a map, which will have multiple props, somewhat of a city map essentially. So such props will include street lights, trash cans, bus stops and all.
However, meshes take a long time to load into the game for some users. Although, did that new mesh instancing update change that, and did it also transform meshes to be better utilized for optimization and performance over parts?
Regardless, I just want to know what’s better for performance, meshes or parts - when creating map props that’ll be repeatedly placed.
But anyway, IMO if the prop is something like a crate/box, or a cylinder-like object, I’d probably go with part/few parts, but if it’s something with a more complex shape, I’d probably go with meshes. Props usually tend to repeat on the map, so instancing will probably help with that (as long as you will reuse assets as much as possible).
To my knowledge, Meshes are loaded once, so it doesn’t matter how many of the same mesh are placed. However, I think with parts, the instancing changes for each part with a minuscule change in it’s size. I could be wrong on the parts, but I would prefer using Meshes for a number of reasons, including they load once, and meshes usually aren’t above a megabyte or two, unless they’re extremely detailed. So the problem of them loading in slowly is almost null, unless your players are playing on dialup connections, or your meshes are going in the 5-10mB range.
Meshes should be fine if they are reused several times and are heavily decimated with the decimate tool to be low enough poly for phones, if mesh instancing works as well as its said to
Check out this reply I’ve wrote about using MeshParts vs Parts here.
Basically, Parts are saved on the client and are extremely light weight, but MeshParts can be more complex without using as many objects. If you need X amount of Parts to achieve the same geometry as a single MeshPart, consider using MeshParts (X is undefined because there are a lot of variables to consider on top of this).
In my experience, I tend to use a mix of Parts and MeshParts in many of my assets since there’s really no benefit in some being purely MeshParts (in most cases, again, multiple variables).
I’ve said this a million times though: If you aren’t sure, test your game. See how much data your map takes up on a full server, try different combinations of Parts and MeshParts. Thoroughly QA your maps to make sure you’re taking advantage of and maximizing your optimizations. Your players will thank you and you’ll have a higher quality end product.
I have a question, you can export parts as an .obj file
and then re-insert them into studio as meshparts.
Should you do that with all parts? Is this beneficial?
…Will this reduce lag?
