[Studio Beta] Introducing Occlusion Culling

Oh, fast clusters don’t get culled yet! That’s still in progress due to boring internal engine details. That’s probably what’s happening here.

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The best improvement so far, to make lag a thing of the past.
However, it seems like when I’m standing in a room made of parts and meshes.
The buildings outside still get rendered which is a meshpart.


Hope to see it soon at Roblox ( i neeeeeed it )

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Do you plan to share what those requirements are for objects to be considered occluders by the engine?

I get ya, but the idea of always offering ONLY automated features with next to no controls exposed to us for the sake of trying to have developers focus less on things like this will only hurt developers in the long run. I have no issue with you guys providing automated features like this, my issue comes from the fact that the automated features with zero control are the ONLY things we get.

It’s insane to believe that it’s possible for developers just to “skip” X Y and Z parts of game development. This idea roblox has does not really do much to help developers and only serves to hurt them more in the long run as ive said. How much should we just blindly trust the magical automated roblox features? So far a lot of them have already proven ineffective and straight up unusable all because they serve to function within magical parameters designed by people at roblox, you yourself should know that specific things (Like the AAA shooters youve worked on) need quite a lot of care and attention specific to THEM. My primary example of those roblox systems proving to be ineffective would be Streaming. Second example would be all of the AI features roblox added, those only serve in wasting other people’s time due to how limited and scuffed their models ultimately are.

Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that this belief of roblox is something they themselves can’t really hold consistently. Just last week roblox announced how they want to force us to rip out all of our chat systems just to use theirs. That’s not exactly something that can be done automatically nor it is allowing developers to focus specifically on game content alone.

Again, i get you and i do agree that micro managing and micro changing one thing 500 times for hours to maybe even days can be super annoying to even barely at all productive. However again, not allowing developers to get the most they can out of the tech roblox provided only serves to hurt developers more, all for the sake of really just straight up forcing them to focus on raw game content alone.
Again, i have no issue with the fact that you guys provide new automated features, my issue comes when said automated features are the one and only options.

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I’ve locally fixed the scale used by special shape spheres and cylinders. It’ll be out in about 2 weeks. Thanks again for the simple repro, that made it very easy!

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Hello, I found that studio will sometimes crash when changing mesh id (any mesh) when occlusion culling is on
This is an old issue that existed prior to beta release

image

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AMAZING WORK! One of the most important features in any engine, this will severely increase the performance of games!

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Does it make sense to place large occluders hidden within the walls / buildings of a map to help the occlusion system?

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Finally Roblox is improving performance. I hope these kind of performance enhancing features keep coming out. Thank you !!!

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Hi @Seiiyo, in this first version, terrain isn’t used as an occluder yet.

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If occlusion culling is working in studio and you’re not seeing an improvement in performance, it could be that 1) for some reason not a lot of objects are getting culled thus not making a great difference, or 2) that your game is not bottlenecked by the drawing cost (we’re reducing the draw cost but something else that’s more expensive is holding back your frame rate).

For the first point, If you bring up the performance overlay in studio (CTRL-SHIFT-F2 on Windows), you’ll be able to tell the before/after triangles/draw calls for a specific viewpoint you want to test. This should tell you how much is getting culled.

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Between this and Buffers, I’m really enjoy the advancements!

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Is there going to be a switch for this or will it just be default for all experiences when it goes live(public)?

Will there be an ‘opt out’ for games that might determine this is taking away from the quality in some way. (i’m not saying it will but, in case it causes some sort of issue)

My game is using humanoid characters ar NPCs and they are quite resource intensive. Do they count as avatars and will not be affected by this update? If so, will they be implemented in a future update?

if you could send a place file for the repro case, then we will have a look. Thank you!

Is occlusion-culled terrain in active development, or should we assume it’s far ahead on the roadmap?

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We can’t say at this point whether we will offer a control to toggle this. There are arguments for and against.

During the rollout stage, we can quickly turn it on or off for individual games. If you notice problems with occlusion culling, please let us know so we can fix them! While we fix them, we’ll disable occlusion culling for your game. We’d much rather fix the problems so that you don’t want to turn it off! I’ve already fixed two issues that were brought up by posts in this topic.

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Culling fast clusters (which includes avatars) is pretty much the first thing on the roadmap after release.

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Good job! This is amazing, I have been waiting years for this update.

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Heres a look at In Nature’s Realm: Instant of Autumn, but isn’t entirely as beneficial as one would expect. Nonetheless, better than nothing!

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