I don’t know what happened but recently Terrain LOD has degraded in quality. I want to say it’s been 4-6 weeks but I haven’t been keeping track. The LOD distance is bad, the LOD itself looks bad, and everything seems slow to update. Grass loads in VERY late.
Also possibly related, Jailbreak load times are through the roof and worse than other games on the front page suddenly. I want to blame Terrain LOD changes but without any tools to look behind the curtain, I don’t know what’s happening. Our join times are currently 3x-5x longer than other top games!
You can reproduce this by hopping in Jailbreak and driving around at high speeds. You can also find the problem in Roblox Studio by flying your camera around at top speed.
The bug happens in both Studio and Player. Mac and PC.
It’s not only bad for players, but a huge headache as a developer. It’s so hard to terraform any terrain because it’s so slow to update. Chunks of terrain go missing until you stop what you’re doing and wait. Developing with Terrain right now is taking a lot longer than it used to.
Appreciate any help on this! Please reply if you’re seeing this problem too and if you have more detail on timing. Thanks for reading!
In my game, we use ospreys to move around from place to place. Those can reach high speeds. When using those ospreys, the LoD becomes extremely noticeable. You can notice holes in the terrain even though they realistically aren’t there, and a lot of black lines.
The performance costs for the terrain are way too high, too. Terrain is the number one cause of fps lag in my game. This shouldn’t be the case, specially since I already use StreamingEnabled and the terrain itself is heavily optimized.
Another thing worth mentioning is that the LoD has no difference regarding quality levels, meaning that quality level 1 has the same LoD as quality level 10.
It would be essential for something to be done about terrain and its LoD. More and more games depend on terrain nowadays, and this is one of the major drawbacks and road blocks towards big terrain worlds.
Terrain LODs have been absolutely terrible for a long time, for my computer at least. No idea why it took so long for it to start affecting Jailbreak but I’ve seen it doing some really terrible things to other games like Vehicle Simulator. If you are moving any faster than your default 16 studs per second, such as in a vehicle, you will encounter heavy stuttering, terrible visual discontinuity and overall lower FPS when you play on a large terrain map. Too many times I have driven into a giant wall of terrain, where there should be no such wall, due to the horrible LOD system.
Dunno why Roblox pushes terrain so heavily, especially in large open world applications, when it is clearly the largest performance penalty to games that make use of it. The system is deeply flawed.
I am experiencing the same issue too currently. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/623866531138371612/757223456772456568/rQzhIemsIY.mp4
Our game puts terrain under objects to have grass on normal parts (only method sadly), which causes really bad LOD stitching from long distances, which only gets removed up close. This hasn’t been an issue previously, and has only occurred now. I am playing on max graphics.
I’ve noticed this happening to me in my game, Great Rift Valley. It’s extremely annoying as I use the terrain to cover up the bottom of the skybox I use. I’ve noticed it happen in pretty much any game with terrain. As a terrain artist, this makes people not want to use terrain, which affects my commissions. The last 3 people who were interested in hiring me did not go through because this is what happens. If this could be resolved, my development experience would be so much better.
The other issue happening is grass not loading in at the correct time. I’ve found that grass can load in minutes after a user joins. Without decoration grass, the game does not look good.
I’ve also noticed how slow and laggy the terrain tools have been in studio. It’s quite literally impossible to make any important edits as I cannot risk losing an entire section. When I import terrain from Gaea and then covert it, it takes hours to change into terrain due to how laggy the terrain editor is recently. Before this, it would take a mere 15 minutes. Terrain editing has also caused my studio to crash recently. It never was an issue until recently.
If anybody needs specs/log files please let me know. I’ll be happy to give them. I truly hope this gets resolved.
This happens regardless of device capability and it’s incredibly annoying; we, as developers, absolutely deserve the right to be able to disable Terrain LoD; it’s incredibly annoying waiting on Terrain detail to return to normal when you’re near it.
I have definitely noticed the long load times on Jailbreak. The terrain LOD has also been very slow and I’ve tried on mobile and pc. Maybe this has something to do with the 40% performance increase that’s been on pending for a long time. Probably not but I don’t know
I also noticed that with grass (the moving grass) , if you remove it sometimes, it will stay in void.
Sometimes the terrain won’t show properly until you load the place again.
I wish I had more info on when this began happening. I was talking to badcc and we remember this becoming a problem shortly after Atmosphere came out. There’s also been talks about a new Terrain LOD hitting Roblox. Is this it? Or is that still in the pipeline?
To add onto computer specs tracking
mid-2013 Mac Pro
Processor: 3.5 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5
Memory: 32 GB DDR3
Graphics: AMD FirePro D700 6 GB
I would have included but truly thought this affected absolutely everybody. At the least, it’s widespread.
Yes, I think this has to do somehow with atmosphere. I can confirm I only started having this issue when atmosphere came out. Hopefully it doesn’t have to do with the property itself as I love using atmosphere.
The atmosphere shipped at 11th of May 2020. Are you guys sure that it happened around that time? Previous reports mentioned 4-6 weeks. Just making sure so I know where to look at.
I think I have been having this issue since then. I just thought my pc/ mobile devices were not good enough to handle terrain well. I just learned recently that this is not a hardware problem as it seems everyone is experiencing it. Maybe this is a coincidence but I am not sure.
I have also noticed this issue. To reproduce it try adding 30+ parts and generate at least 5000x5000 terrain with some water. Then erode some terrain and place a part in the area you eroded. Set your walk speed to a high value and as you approach it you should see this bug. I would also agree it started occurring around the time of atmosphere being added.
. This happens just by moving camera in studio right? What is your computer? Can you maybe provide another examples?
