Hello, my game No-Scope Arcade has a fair number of mobile devices that experience a crash rate greater than or equal to 20%, and and no more than 40%. Such devices include:
Amazon mid-end and high-end devices
Early versions of iPhone, the lowest end being iPhone 6
Some iPad devices, such iPad Air.
The cause of the issue is unknown and has started occurring only recently (starting mid-December). These devices being filtered have caused the CCU to decrease from ~2000 to ~500 on average at any time of the day. This contradicts with our data showing higher engagement, spending, and retention, which leaves us even more confused. Statistics can be provided per request.
Are there any ideas as to why this is happening? If you don’t know, I would still love to know what the crash rates of your games are, if applicable.
First check with your devices and check the amount of memory being used.
Next, maybe decrease some of the memory like using more meshes.
Could be a un-told update, some people actually had these problems.
I know the latest Beta Terrain water update seems to have slowed my Studio down a lot lately, and the place itself, but there might be something you’ve changed that caused increased lag.
Have you and your developers tried to play the game to see if you are experiencing increased lag that could just be more than low end devices can handle?
We’ve extensively tested on a variety of devices, including low-end computers, low-end phones, and console. We are yet to experience any issues ourselves.
What I’d recommend you do to find out the cause is basically have it so that every interval , memory usage of each user is sent to a spreadsheet of some sort with memory. This could possibly help out in finding out if this is a memory issue.
With about 200 thousand users joining every day with an average session time of 9.25 minutes, assuming the interval is ~1 minute, that makes 1,850,000 data entries per day, which would not be manageable.
If your game includes any Sound instances, try removing them.
I’m having a problem with my game where any sound instance that is inserted has the potential to crash all clients that load it in. The client freezes up and the memory usage increases and does not stop. The game is unplayable without sound, but this does not happen to me with SFX, only music (due to file size). You should probably remove any of these in your game and see if it fixes the problem.
TL;DR: Those devices are old with no capabilities and they probably crash everywhere else too.
We have very similar crash rates in our game despite our work to optimise the map and decrease memory usage.
In the past, we’ve decreased the tris on some of our core meshes (bases of our islands, etc) by 50%. This has increased FPS on all devices that we test (low and high-end devices, today’s latest phones and some older phones), but hasn’t really changed our crash rates. The same devices that you have said are also the ones that have remained in the crash rates since I joined my team in 2021.
We’ve boiled it down to the potential that these devices simply don’t have the capabilities to run today’s Roblox games (even the most popular ones) without encountering some kind of stuttering, crashing or lag. Since these devices are incredibly old (and there’s also nothing else that we can really do anymore lol), we’ve just given up and instead chose to be alarmed only by newer devices if they pop up.
I talked to boatbomber and he mentioned that he had a zero percent crash rate, but is unfamiliar with what is the standard on Roblox. It’s helpful that you let me know that your rates are similar.
If your game has any of these instances: Parts, Meshes, Particles, PlayerInstances, Scripts, Modules, Animations, Welds Try removing them all and it’s sure to stop this, It’s the only way i was able to stop the crashing.
The way you have your game set up you may have a whole bunch of ‘potential’ causes of lag which might be the issue. All the other background stuff like @3_F7 said is getting loaded into the Roblox game programming and physics.
Kinda like playing Solitaire on your phone, but having 5 YouTube videos running, a movie playing, as well as 3 sources of music. Older devices probably can’t handle the extra stuff going on in the background of Roblox Player.
boatbomber may have his game optimized better than you and @ellis do.
Another question is how much of Roblox Physics are you relying on? Turning off CanTouch and Anchoring as much as you can can help out the Physics engine a bit.
To answer the question about physics objects, only the characters and their subsequent ragdoll models are unanchored. The ViewModel has unanchored limbs, but that’s required to animate it, and the root of it is anchored (and thus, it is not physically simulated).
Do you have any idea as to what is being loaded in?
I actually was referring to all the items he was listing as the ‘background’ items. You may only be using 10 Parts in your game, but all of those other items have to be available for every Roblox game because they’re part of the experience.
If you only use 1 item of the hundreds of instances, Services, Lighting, Storage, Pathfinding, and other items available they are still going in the background.
If you must have 1.8 million data entries to debug your game, then go for it. You could also only take data from a specific amount of players, maybe 1/25
