I have a bit of experience with 3DS Max and hate building most things in ROBLOX Studio. Therefore, I would prefer making most of the assets for my game in 3DS Max but I don’t know if it will make the game lag at all. Anybody know?
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Biggest problem is loading all the meshes, every mesh would be a http request on the client, the more meshes, the more loading. I’d use meshes for the most important things, like say a driving game, use them for the cars, weapons, etc, but not the map
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Use them when needed, they can be more optimized and load better then Roblox CSG/Unions. For items that are very high detail or very complex they’re nice being mesh; but as said the more you have the higher the load time.
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These are the types of meshes I am doing. This is a cartoon-styled jetty that I want on some of the islands
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Looks really good! All and all it depends on how many there’d be. For something like that I would personally try to use parts/wedges to get the shape simply because having possibly several hundred mesh planks and poles might cause some issues, but you can always experiment with that sort of stuff.
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I know @Spathi made cartoony walkways that look almost identical to this, but he used CSG/Unions instead of meshes.
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Short answer:
Not if you use them correctly.
Long answer:
Meshes by themselves don’t cause lag; Instead, the way you create and use them determines your game’s performance. Beginning developers often fall in some common pitfalls that can have drastic impact on performance such as:
- Meshes contain way more tris/faces than necessary.
- Meshes have textures that are of too high quality.
- Too many unique meshes are used.
- Maps contain too many meshes in general.
If you are able to avoid these mistakes, you should not notice any lag as you call it (although you would usually refer to this as frame drops and/or bad performance). Here are some tricks to easily circumvent the pitfalls I just mentioned:
- Use a decimate modifier (may be called differently outside of Blender) to cut down on the tri count of a mesh. If you do not notice the difference between the original mesh and the decimated mesh from a small distance, then your players won’t notice the difference either and you can use the optimized mesh instead.
- If your mesh is not going to take up more than a 100x100 area on your screen most of the time, then you do not need to give the mesh textures that have a higher resolution than 100x100 pixels. They will be rendered at a smaller scale either way. So for small meshes, use small textures to save on memory.
- Meshes that are reused and left unmodified can be drawn at once on the screen with some neat engine-level tricks. So if you are for example building a forest, only using a couple different trees can benefit you a lot.
- Just don’t go overboard when filling your maps with meshes. For example when you are building a forest, you can use some background textures for out of bounds areas instead of a ton of meshes.
If you follow these tips, you shouldn’t run into any issues at all.
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Not really an issue, in fact i use meshes for most of the building process in my workflow, it comes really handy for Low Poly like environments, not only because of the aesthetics but because smooth Material doesnt has as much of load (Normal maps, Bump Maps, Specular…)
I once tried to spawn a lot of grass like meshes around a really long map and i didnt had problems with it.
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Meshes can be a very useful tool in game but there are some negatives to using it.
I will start by pointing out the positives. The first benefit to using meshes is that you can reduce the tri/poly count in game by using meshes. You can also get better detail and precision on the meshes compared to Roblox parts. Another benefit is that other 3D programs might be easier to use when you understand them.
With that in mind, there are obviously some negatives to using meshes. Meshes typically take longer to load in because it has to download each mesh separately every time you join the game. The second negative is that when you get higher file sized models, the models start to take way too long to download making load times ridiculously high. The last negative i’d like to point out is that if you don’t know a program and have never used a 3D program in your life or in a long time it can be hard to learn and therefore halt development until you figure out how to use and optimize meshes.
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I learned form my mistake when I made my whole map with meshes, I even made terrain with meshes! Meshes take time to load and arent really THAT optimized for Roblox plus their hitboxes arent that good ( but they keep getting better )
Try to use robloxs parts as much as you can because Roblox Engine is ofcourse optimized for Roblox Parts.
Use Meshes made in 3DSmax/Blender if your object really cant be made with Roblox Parts , in my example a car
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Well, it might be better you make sure they do not have too much detail or the builds can cause the environment to cause intense lag.
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You should only really use meshes when you need a special brick that isn’t a Roblox default (ex: cone or some other special brick), or have made something in blender and imported it into Roblox Studio.
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Blender models right?
Do you not get that small invisible block in which your player walks over? Or is it smooth.
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As many people are saying, you should use it only when needed because of importing and texturing and pretty much overall it takes longer. Unless you have a very complicated build you want to make, Studio is the best for building.