StreamingEnabled toggle for each player

Feature Requests Engine Features
1

I was testing streamingenabled in Pilgrim Islands Reborn - Roblox

THE GOOD:

  • those with worse connections can join the game instantly instead of disconnecting after 120 seconds of loading (a separate issue with its own thread)
  • those who could already load the game but had worse graphics hardware can now use higher graphics settings due to not seeing 40,000 bricks at a time.

THE BAD:

  • can’t see large builds until you’re within 100 studs of them (another separate issue with its own thread)
  • high or floating builds are pretty much unseeable as you would pass right under them
  • hard to navigate in the big ocean with islands if you’re not an experienced player due to far away landmarks being not loaded

A user suggested a local streaming toggle which I thought was an amazing idea.

  • scriptable user setting (localscript? server script?) As long as it isn’t from the Esc roblox menu due to possible localscript issues with not knowing if a far away object exists - hence letting the game creator decide with this scriptability.
  • would prompt people with a splash screen when they load the game if they would like to turn chunk loading off, or keep it on (default on so the worse-connection people can actually load my game)

This scriptable toggle, if it’s feasible, would keep the best of both. <:

Any renderer admins have feedback or a reason why this couldn’t work, like if I grossly misunderstood the requirements for streamingenabled?

2

You’re clearly seeing streaming not behaving the way it should be. All of the problems except the last one are pretty much a bug of some sort in our networking code as far as I can tell. Looking into it.

As far as the last problem, you’ll always have it on poor connections / low memory computers since we won’t stream in stuff that’s super far away from you. Maybe a minimap or some 3D landmark GUI would help here though?.. (even without streaming, how do I know where to fly?)

3

[quote] You’re clearly seeing streaming not behaving the way it should be. All of the problems except the last one are pretty much a bug of some sort in our networking code as far as I can tell. Looking into it.

As far as the last problem, you’ll always have it on poor connections / low memory computers since we won’t stream in stuff that’s super far away from you. Maybe a minimap or some 3D landmark GUI would help here though?.. (even without streaming, how do I know where to fly?) [/quote]

Does it maybe make sense to take the direction/speed of velocity of the character into account when deciding which chunks to stream?

4

[quote]
Does it maybe make sense to take the direction/speed of velocity of the character into account when deciding which chunks to stream? [/quote]

Right, so we don’t do this right now but the problem is deeper - something malfunctions in the streaming logic and it does not really send chunks even if you stop flying.

The general problem with using velocity and direction is that they tend to change a lot more than position does, especially given that streaming decisions are performed by the server so you have an extra 100 ms or so of latency.

5

While you’re looking into this, it appears that Smooth Terrain streaming doesn’t work too well either. My game uses more objects in a tighter space, but these objects cannot be seen all the time, so a tighter streaming space would improve performance greatly.

6

Can you give me an example place? The tests that I’ve done work pretty well.

7

Can you give me an example place? The tests that I’ve done work pretty well.[/quote]

8

Can you record a video of the bug? Works fine for me.