I was wondering how the performance of Smooth Terrain is these days, and how well it works on various platforms (PC, tablets, phones).
I was considering making a Smooth Terrain map size of Massive (1024), but want to be sure that this is not going to cause lag and problems in my games.
At 1024 you’re gonna be pretty safe. I only had problems when doing stuff like 3072x3072
You probably will not have problems frame rate wise due to LOD and other optimizations, but memory may be a problem depending on the map.
It should be fine but what i would advise is use the ‘Regions’ tool in the terrain editor and remove most of the bottom of the terain [See screenshot] to substantially decrease the voxels. On a map i am working on i did this and managed to remove 50 million voxels by doing this!
This is definitely the way to go for optimising terrain. Removing large chunks will save you a lot of memory. Also - use terrain to its fullest potential in terms of detail. A large flat terrain baseplate has the same performance cost as an intricate terrain map of the same size.
To my knowledge, this is not true. The voxels are stored using run-length-encoding in memory, which means that large sections that are completely solid or completely air do not cost very much in memory usage.
The more detailed your voxel terrain is, the less effective the compression will be, increasing memory usage.
You’re right actually - I think the comment I saw was about terrain VS parts in terms of cost for detail. My bad.
You might also be thinking of what was said during RDC where Arseny stated that using different materials does not increase the cost
Oh. That’s probably it too.
How would I go about creating a smooth terrain map larger than Massive (1024)? The Studio Tools have Massive as the maximum size.
Wouldn’t a map larger then that be laggy or hard to run on devices due to size?
It’s possible to modify the inbuilt terrain editor to add extra sizes and custom biomes. I made a video which demonstrates it (However it was made when we had the old pre-studio widget terrain editor so it might not all be valid anymore). I will try and find it in a bit.
Edit:
That video is basically useless now, instead if you navigate to the ‘TerrainToolsInLuaWidget.rbxmx’ file which is located under AppData>Local>Roblox>Versions>[LatestStudioVersion]>BuiltInPlugins (Provided you’re on windows), you can then add a new entry in the ‘kMapSizeChoices’ table to set a new terrain size. When I looked it seemed to be on line 2920 of the plugin (You can edit the rbmx file directly in something like notepad++).
You should seriously consider the impact it could have on lower end systems. I recently did a build for someone and was informed that it took up way too much memory, so we had to scrap that idea and move to a part-based system (among other reasons). However, if you did what previous people mentioned and remove most of the underside, it should be ok.
I guess I will stick to the massive size (1024) then, and not go any larger than that.
