For my upcoming project, I plan to use Streaming Enabled, if deemed to reduce memory on the client. The problem I might have with using this is the Wiki. It seems the information might be outdated- there’s two properties under Workspace where I assume its associated to Streaming (StreamingMinRadius and StreamingTargetRadius). However it doesn’t mention this in the Wiki. Is there other things I should take into consideration upon using this feature(other than what’s current in wiki)?
Noticed no one had replied yet so I’ll try to give some help
StreamingEnabled is helpful in reducing client memory, since it will reduce the number of loaded and rendered instances. However, this does come at a cost.
What StreamingEnabled is essentially doing, is reducing memory while increasing networking resources. The reason behind it is quite simple; the server has to send all the geometry to the player depending on their location and this geometry can be costly to replicate. It will mostly depend on the type of game and the world you’re building. If you are building a vehicle-based game where the player is moving quickly, the server has to send a lot more geometry a lot faster than if you are building a slow-paced adventure game.
Using network resources to lower client memory isn’t a bad practice, but be aware of the impact of increased networking activity. In physics-heavy games (like the mentioned vehicle game), you don’t want to constantly replicate map geometry while also replicating players and their vehicles. This will result in very noticable and undesirable lag, especially for players on slower network connections or those playing on mobile devices.
For some first-hand experience, I can tell you that our 2018 Incubator project VentureLand had an awful time running on mobile devices with StreamingEnabled on, to the point where it would be barely playable on the newest hardware. This was with countless of optimizations and only replicating the essential map geometry (all detailed models were created client-side), and ~40 players driving around in the map.
Regarding the documentation, those new properties were released last year and still haven’t been documented on the Wiki. In general all the StreamingEnabled documentation seems to be very outdated and there is little information to be found regarding the interaction between StreamingEnabled and other features.
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Thank you. I had always knew about this property but I never caught on and I lacked knowledge- I think there was some information in the Developer Conference but that’s about it.
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We’ve added some more details about streaming enabled here:
and updated a few documentation pages with missing information.
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