Ways to Prevent Lag & Optimize Your Game

[NJtoCA]

I need some tips on ways to prevent lag. The dos and don’ts. What should I avoid altogether when making a game.
Here are some of the objects that’ll be in my game: Trees, buildings, cars, guns, houses.

[PhoenixRessusection (PhoenixCausesOof)]

Well, you could make an setting that determines the level of quality the game will have. Such as, low, medium, high, etc.

Graphics Quality

Low/Medium/High

Although, I do not really know how to prevent lag. You could try, somehow, making a system where you can also determine how far does your rendering reaches, and the speed things will render.

[Mystifine]

I’ve been researching this topic for a long time now, safe enough to say I have some accurate information.

Building

• Use Unions for similar objects (repetitive chairs, tables, trees, etc)
• Avoid using textures in areas where players will not be able to visually see it.
• Overall, avoid too many parts, I believe there was something called greedy mesh where if you had multiple parts that could be merged it will merge it.
• Set BasePart and Meshes CollisionFidelity to Hull.
• Anchor parts that don’t need to be moved, this will remove physic calculations from that part.
• Transparency will also have an impact on your game
• Streaming enabled

Scripting

• Clean up your RBXConnections and instances to avoid memory leaks.
• Compress code and use more efficient methods/algorithms for certain tasks
• Use functions and local function and variables
• Avoid redundant variables (they take up memory)
• Coroutine over spawn
• Use loops carefully and well.

Graphical User Interface

• Don’t just move the Frames off your screen, toggle visibility
• Clean up after using TweenService if you ever use it

There are plenty of links that explain in more detail:

Building Optimisation | Tips and tricks!

UPDATE - 2021 This post is slightly old now so some information on the topics discussed may be out of date or incorrect. Another post may come out at some point updating this information but this is something to keep in mind when reading this post as of now. ________________ 2008. The year where games on the small but relatively ambitious platform “ROBLOX” were the simplest they could get. With limited development resources, many developers were confined to the basic brick and pre-made meshe…

Scripting optimisation questions

running the code in a numeric for loop while using tick() to time it Script 1: local t = tick() for i =1,100000 do workspace.Part.Size = Vector3.new(1, 1, 1) end print(tick()-t,"vnew function") -- 0.19797945022583 vnew function Script 2: local t = tick() for i =1,100000 do local vectornew = Vector3.new workspace.Part.Size = vectornew(1, 1, 1) end print(tick()-t,"direct call") --0.18948841094971 direct cal ik this isnt a perfect timing system, but with large enough numbers , the…

https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/articles/Improving-Performance

Documentation - Roblox Creator Hub

[Mirzadaswag]

Not to be rude or anything, but aren’t unions performance-heavy? I remember people comparing them with meshes and turns out, meshes are faster

edit: I know how you can turn a simple group of parts into one mesh and reduce lag…? I haven’t tested it but it’s like this (I made a topic about it a long, long time ago, and now I use Cinema4D for meshes and texturing.):

[Mystifine]

Oh yes, I forgot to mentioned that you should always use Meshes over Unions, it’s fine to be a last minute thing but you shouldn’t make unions as a habit.

Sorry I forgot to mention it. I’ve also read that Unions are better in certain cases where repetitive objects in small quantities are used for example like wooden chairs.

Best performance for lots of parts

Unions are no different from meshes at the render level - in fact, union data is stored on the game where meshdata is loaded, so you’re actually incurring more network penalty by having to Http Request them in post-game load. The only advantage is the ability to perform your own poly reduction in a tool like blender. They do not always use much more resources than parts - if you use a union in place of a few parts, then it will be less efficient, but if you use a union in specifically suitable…

Do unions cause server lag?

The reason why you’re getting mixed answers is because it heavily depends on what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. Some background information on how unions work might be appropriate: When you create a UnionOperation, Roblox has to do calculations on what the new object should look like geometry wise. The objects you have selected are combined into a new object and Roblox will try to make the UnionOperation as accurate as possible while only generating as few tris/triangles as possible, be…

[GreekForge]

How exactly do you clean up after TweenService? And, what exactly do you mean by clean up connections and instances?

[3rdhoan123 (Future Noob)]

This is a reply that I often find help people, see if any of the following matches with your game:

Learning what actually cause game performance issues

Ill try to list some though I may be incorrect on some Large mass of parts in one area being rendered Changing properties/rendering things such as material/color/transparency increase lag. Objects that are transparent between 1 and 0 (Ex: 0.9, 0.99, 0.01, 0.05) cause more stress though might not be that noticable Meshes/any unions that contain difficult rendering problems/collisions (If you’re using the default collision fidelity thing) increase lag. Collisi…

[Mystifine]

When using TweenService to create a tween, it actually creates an object which you can destroy.

local TweenService = game:GetService("TweenService")

local Something = TweenService:Create(Arg1, Arg2, Arg3)
Something:Play()
Something:Destroy() -- clean it up

As for connections and instances, it’s the same thing, you don’t want useless stuff in your game or else it will end up crashing at once point because you have all this useless garbage in your world.

For cleaning up instances, if you clone or create a instance and no longer need it then destroy it. As for a connection, be careful where you put it. A example is if you were to place a InputBegan connection in StarterCharacterScripts, this would create more connections overtime because the old one does not get cleaned up.

local Connection
Connection = RBXConnection(function()
--> If you only want this to work once;
Connection:Disconnect()
Connection = nil
end)

[3rdhoan123 (Future Noob)]

@Mystifine

When using TweenService to create a tween, it actually creates an object which you can destroy.

That is a thing I’ve never knew was a thing until now, even the developer hub wiki: https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/api-reference/class/TweenService/index.html
doesnt go into any detail about it or that it event remotely exists other than the functions list, thanks for calling that out

[GreekForge]

Would that also apply to loaded animation tracks? Or is that something we should be careful around?

[Mystifine]

Nope, but for optimization for animation tracks, I suggest having to load all animations upon respawn or character added. Then have a module to return the table of animations.

The benefits of this is that you’re not reloading animations over and over as well and you have more control over your animations because your local scripts are able to access the same animations.

In the end, if it’s already loaded use it.