Sometimes chunks of geometry are no longer loading (probably streaming) in (since about a week)

Bug Reports Engine Bugs
#1

Reproduction Steps
Unfortunately I cannot reliably reproduce it, so details and potential clues about the issue itself are presented instead.

Since about a week I’ve started to receive a significant amount of reports from players that parts are no longer loading (streaming) in reliably when getting close to them anymore. I suspect this is related to StreamingEnabled and that some chunks are not streaming in.

See e.g. the two examples below:

image

image

Note that in the 1st image some parts are still visible, but those are expected to be in another Streaming chunk (they’re large parts). StreamingEnabled always tended to load these large parts in before the rest, so it’s not odd in my eyes that just those are visible.
Note that in the 2nd image some parts are visible too in areas that don’t stream in, but those are locally created parts. Only the server-sided parts that are streamed to the player are not visible.

The reports got significant frequency since the 2nd/3rd of March. Users claim it started a little before then, though.

Images seem to suggest large parts in these chunks might be related to the cause. Missing areas are estimated to contain potentially large parts, such as 256x40x256 studs large. In all cases the full chunk goes missing, though, not just these large parts. Might be coincidence, though.

Streaming is enabled and Pausing is enabled too. Users do not pause when getting close to these areas, they just fall through the ground.

Parts definitely do not stream in. Terrain might fail to stream in too, but I’ve not been able to determine with high confidence if this actually is the case.

The PC platform is definitely affected.

Affected game: https://www.roblox.com/games/69184822/Theme-Park-Tycoon-2

Expected Behavior
It’s expected that chunks always load in.

Actual Behavior
See the reproduction section for information about what happens.

Workaround
Users don’t seem to be able to work around this issue without rejoining the game.

Issue Area: Engine
Issue Type: Display
Impact: High
Frequency: Sometimes
Date First Experienced: 2022-03-02 00:03:00 (+01:00)

9 Likes
#2

We have just turned off a change that might be related - could you please let us know if you still see the problem?

2 Likes
#3

Thanks for the update! I’ll let you know as soon as I receive additional reports about this problem, or confirm that I’ve received no new reports in a few days from now.

3 Likes
#4

Hi - Do you have any updates yet?

1 Like
#5

I haven’t received any additional reports about this since you’ve turned off that change, so chances are that change may have caused this issue.

3 Likes
#6

Got a single report claiming it’s still occurring now, unfortunately. No other reports besides that one in the last 5 days though, and previously I got at least one per day…

2 Likes
#7

I see, that’s good to know, thanks. I am pretty confused as to why the change we reverted was causing this problem for your game, and the reversion should’ve gone through to every server very quickly (on the order of minutes).

There was a Server release the same day, so it could be the case that some other factor either fixed the issue or caused it to occur less frequently.

Please keep me updated as to when the issue occurs/if you have any repro steps!

2 Likes
#8

Did you always get reports like this, or did they start March 2/3?

1 Like
#9

They started around that time.

I did get another report on Feb 24 related to chunks not streaming in correctly, but that seemed unrelated and could potentially be an issue on their end (slow network/flags). That user claimed they were having the issue for months too, which doesn’t match up with the reports I got since March 2/3 as well.

Since the terrain LOD streaming got fixed in 2021 I haven’t received any other streaming-related reports (i.e. zero reports for months).

2 Likes
#10

I got the same issue with my golf game, and it seems to affect terrain detail too. This is a video one player uploaded: Junkbotfre plays bloxy golfing (gameplay) - YouTube

1 Like
#11

Actually, I have seen this issue in many games for a while now. Specifically in Theme Park Tycoon 2, chunks have not been loading correctly since last October-November, at least for me.

Edit: This doesn’t happen every time I play TPT2, it seems to happen at random times.

1 Like
#12

I still occasionally receive reports about this issue as well, although at a much lower frequency than before. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to figure out additional details about the issue currently (nor have I been able to reproduce it myself).

It does seem like terrain does replicate in the area, but remains at a low LOD, but I haven’t been able to truly confirm this still.

2 Likes
#13

I believe I am experiencing an issue similar to this as well. I do not have any reproduction information as I cannot reliably reproduce this, but even on a stable internet, stable framerate, etc. Sometimes 1 chunk on my entirely flat, grass, smooth terrain in my game does not load no matter how close or far away I get to it.

Streaming min: 384
Streaming max: 640
Streaming pause: enabled

1 Like
#14

We’ve fixed related issues that we believe solved this issue. We wanted to circle back to double check. Please let us know if you’re still experiencing these problems!

2 Likes
#15

I have been experiencing a similar problem with large sections of my world not appearing at random. You mention a fix for a related problem which I believe may be the one I am experiencing here. Below is an image of what players are seeing - or rather, not seeing - in my game.

image
image1920×1080 145 KB

And here is what it is supposed to look like (and usually does look like while playing)

image
image1190×536 52.9 KB

StreamingEnabled is set to false. This area of the world is a couple hundred units from the world origin. The environment here exists of mostly individual parts that are not grouped together into a model, so Model level-of-detail shouldn’t be playing much of a role either. The parts are all static anchored parts. Raycasts and collisions all still work. The objects are just not rendering. The issue also seems to always appear on specifically these parts. I haven’t experienced it anywhere else in the game so far.

If this is a different issue, let me know and I will write a bug report for it separately. If not, I hope this information can be useful in further debugging the problem.

3 Likes
#16

:red_circle: It seems like the issue hasn’t been resolved. Since 2021 when I first enabled StreamingEnabled in my game, some players reported their game not fully loading in despite being close to the objects. Trees missing trunks/leaves, buildings missing some parts here and there, and much more. With that said, I turned off StreamingEnabled because of its issues.

On September 9th, 2023 I decided to give it another try now that Opportunistic is a thing and that it has better things than before to offer. The issue experienced back in the days seems to still be present with players reporting their world is not loading in and that some assets are missing.

Checking the Error Report stats in the game also showed me some LocalScripts erroring because of non-existent objects. Have in mind that these objects the scripts are trying to access works fine for me and when testing in Studio. The model is set to atomic, and Roblox makes it clear that waiting for the descendants of such Model is not needed since the objects will already be available.

image
image1107×168 35 KB

It doesn’t seem to be working as the documentation says and if memory is affecting how Atomic behaves then the documentation should be changed to reflect it. Some players were not able to play the game because of some critical errors like the game trying to access a custom swimmable liquid in the game I made which are set to Atomic, but the texture block wasn’t streamed in.

Even when changing to WaitForChild I now get the infinite yield warning. Which shows the game is just deciding to not stream things in.

This is a picture one of the players sent:

image
image1092×671 72.2 KB

The things in red are missing trunks and seems to be like the mesh failed to load more than anything. And the orange lines represent some trees/bushes and more items that should be displaying at that distance and yet it looks empty…

Unrelated Question But Please Answer It

Also, how much is the memory expected to decrease with StreamingEnabled on? According to the Performance analytics there wasn’t a single critical change on memory usage other than from crashes a little bit.

The game’s map is 4k by 4k (x, z). The StreamingEnabled properties are as follow:
image

Isn’t 580 more than enough to maybe decrease the client’s memory graph which is at 2.4GB at P90 by maybe half…? Using two different devices I saw when testing the memory reduced by 200MB at the time of joining, which seems a lot, but the graphs remain unchanged.

2 Likes
#17

This is now occurring again, like the above. I’ve got a few specialmeshes which are large in size that won’t appear in game (they did before a recent update) but do appear as normal in Studio. Disabling StreamingEnabled fixes the problem and allows the meshes to appear as normal.

#18

@Focia19 @thirdtakeonit Any chance of some acknowledgement? I really don’t want to have to turn this setting off and sacrifice loading times and efficiency

#19

Are these problems still occurring? Are you able to create a repro place for any of the issues?

#20

@Hadiisepic - please open a new ticket if you’re still seeing issues or DM me: @welblander