[Technical] Optimization for AO

Game Discussion
46

Is there any place I can check on the progress of these, maybe a log of the changes they are making?

47

Can’t give you a perfect answer for this. Some of the things I mentioned are being developed internally - like Foundation. For the most part though, you can watch the Roblox release notes that usually drop every week (Wednesday or Friday I have noticed) as well as watch the API updates. They also drop announcement updates for big changes about one or two times a day through Monday - Thursday on the DevForum. You can also keep up with the Roadmap that updates every 2-3 months which lists all the big changes coming for Roblox. Links to all these sources:

(had to put the latest release 644 so it shows a page, but whenever you wanna check press current release on the side)

2 Likes
48

“what the fuck is this”

49

my dear trotter, you know this tells nothing to the average galloper eyes…

50
  • I’m not sure what the “new texture” thing is, but AO does not use textures for its terrain, it uses custom materials
  • Memory increases as you’re in a server due to your client loading more and more textures from items, this is why players with large inventories have more passive memory taken than others because the textures and models are cached on their client
  • NPCs and enemies both already unload and are de-humanoided based on distance
  • Islands have their details minimized in the distance, and faraway ones are completely unloaded
  • NPC ships and player ships are already lower detailed and completely unloaded based on distance

A lot of people are under the impression that AO’s high memory usage is due to an optimization issue, but fail to realize the game has tens of thousands (not an exaggeration) of different item textures and meshes it can potentially load. Every time you see a new item or chestpiece in-game by obtaining it, or seeing it on a player model, thats new meshes and textures being cached on your client in that session. If this were actually a memory leak as people think it was, you’d see your client memory keep increasing until it maxes out and you crash

9 Likes
51

Ngl I still think there should just be an option in settings to replace all the item models in your inventory with text labels

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52

what about the networking stuff? the game seems to be an awful lot more laggy on that side this update, and i’m close to certain that it’s not just a me issue

1 Like
53

So the solution is to replace all the 3D models with decals? Is there a reason why you don’t? A reason why you even did it in the first place?

54

Yeah it’s really hard to optimize a game like AO with so many specific items with their own meshes and textures. I know this may or may not apply to AOs case, but I do know that it’s possible to create even more calls for two or more meshes - or textures - if their AssetIDs are different even if they’re the exact same. Do you know if this something you can check (I saw a plugin the other day that does it for you with a click of a button but it’s USD) or do you already know AO doesn’t have this issue?

55

I don’t think most people on the forums know what a memory leak is.

As for the rest of this, I wasn’t honestly expecting much more improvements towards FPS to be something that can really be done. We’ll see if Roblox implements some stuff for that, but at the end of the day I was more interested in this topic as it pertained to the network stuff. So I’d like to see a response more dedicated to addressing this to cover that part of this topic.

1 Like
56

yea its planned, didnt make it into the update though

9 Likes
57

The occlusion culling thing theyre working on should help lower end PCs a bit (i dont imagine a lot) but yea lol, i have people pinging me about memory leaks when they actually just mean a lag spike :skull:

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58

image

59

One of the people complaining about AO optimization in another Discord server said this for their specs:
Decent CPU
Unspecified 40 Series GPU

Which could honestly be anything, and they were expecting 200 FPS instead of 100 FPS (somehow). For all I know, they had a 4050 Laptop GPU or something, and even then Roblox tends to be more CPU bound.

60

making decals for the thousands of possible items isnt feasible, and itd just be another texture for your client to cache

the option to load them as text instead would help a bit, but memory isnt even the problem lag-wise for people. Unless you’re playing with like 4gb of ram that is

7 Likes
61

Well, I’m definitely not on your level of experience, but I’d think loading a whole 3D model just to display it as a flat image anyway doesn’t sound too optimized compared to just loading a flat image.

62

What he meant by not feasible was that uploading that many decals for that many items is just not a thing that could be done easily or at all on Roblox. It is theoretically possible, but just not a good idea.

63

itd be a negligible performance improvement, the 3d models are only loaded for the items shown at the actual scroll position, its not rendering thousands of 3d models at once while your inventory is open

9 Likes
64

Is that so? I guess it’d be laggy either way then. I’ve been wondering that for a long time, so thanks.

65

MY CRAPTOP THINKPAD… ONE DAY… WILL RUN AO ABOVE 5 FPS…

6 Likes