Good day to the ones reading this, am a developer who likes to make landscapes as realistic as possible, but there is the obvious issue of lag. And even if I turn on terrain streaming, you cannot see the distant terrain which is a bummer. But there is a middleman in this issue. This can be seen in the following example:
Here we have some terrain, a skirmish battle map to be precise, it is of medium size (as in half of the 16000x16000 terrain import limit). Does it look nice? In my opinion yes, for something that was made in 1 hour or less:
But it lacks that lively feel we get from going around it. Here is where mesh terrain comes in:
Two things were changed, that being the skybox which needs to be working in unison with the mesh terrain, and the addition of mesh terrain itself. As you can see, the overall atmosphere is much more enticing, essentially a glow-up from the previous image, since, unlike skyboxes with terrain included in the photos, the mesh terrain shifts with the player’s perspective when they move around the map, and thanks to the big size of the terrain itself, it gives off the feeling of being in a map that is much bigger than what it actually is. The overall process of making and adding the mesh terrain is not complicated, there are a lot of Blender add-ons and a lot of dedicated software like Gaea that specialises in making landscapes, plus, thanks to the mesh import feature that Roblox Studio has added a few months ago, we do not worry about triangle limit since Roblox automatically lowers the quality of the mesh (ex. The terrain mesh used in the example has the original data size of 107Mb). Is it easy? Yes. Is it necessary? Not really, since people focus on gameplay, so it is mostly up to the preference of the developer. But I do believe this is a must-have in all showcases that include or want to include a picturesque atmosphere. And if you want to glow up your maps that have open large-scale terrain, please start using mesh terrain. If you do not know how to properly set up big mesh terrain, here’s the overall structure of large-scale mesh terrain that overcomes the size limit of traditional Roblox Studio mesh import:
Though mesh terrain is not a new idea, it is quite underrated. The overall idea of mesh terrain is versatile since you can add massive distant low-tri meshes like castles, bridges, fortresses, decal 2D tree lines, decal villages etc. The possibility is immense, and I believe it is an untapped source of possibilities in making Roblox an overall greater and bigger experience. Since I’m talking from the perspective of a landscape artist outside of Roblox, I’d be happy to hear feedback from other fellow developers who see Roblox in a different light.
