Lightning Fast Loads: Streaming Is Enabled!

StreamingPartsFallLast month, we talked with ROBLOX Engineer Yunpeng Zhu about prototyping and testing our new streaming parts system in our test environment. After gathering a ton of useful feedback we’re proud to announce that this new feature has been implemented on ROBLOX, and you can enable it in any one of your places or games starting today. This means other players will be able to enter your game at lighting-fast speeds, and will allow players with older hardware to run large games more smoothly. To start, we thought we’d walk you through how to implement this exciting new feature in ROBLOX Studio. We also got the chance to talk to a pair of builders about their experiences with part streaming and how it’s changed their mentalities.

Enabling streaming parts in Studio

To begin, open your place in Studio. Select your Workspace from the Explorer panel (View > Explorer), and you’ll notice a brand new checkbox in the Properties (View > Properties) called “StreamingEnabled”. For most games, enabling this feature is as easy as checking that box. If you have a game that depends heavily on LocalScripts, you might need to make some adjustments to those scripts in order to make them work properly. You can find out how to do this, as well as a ton of other useful information and tips, at the ROBLOX Wiki. We’ve also given you the tools you need to immediately test part streaming in your game to ensure that everything is working properly before you upload it back to ROBLOX.

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With Streaming Join, Levels Load as You Play

Our Client Network Team is focused on getting players into games as quickly and efficiently as possible. Their top three goals: decrease join times, allow builders to make more complex places and creations, and offer support for all types of legacy hardware and mobile devices. The idea of real-time part streaming has been kicked around as a solution that is in keeping with our goals. Soon you will be given the option to enable streaming for your place or game via a new Studio setting. This brings about several ramifications we will discuss in this article, and ROBLOX Engineer Yunpeng Zhu will provide the details.

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Pushing ROBLOX Place Data Faster Than Ever Before

Data StreamHave you noticed that you’ve been jumping into ROBLOX games quicker? That’s because our networking team has been hard at work exploring ways to make our network more stable, secure, and most importantly, fast. After a ton of experimenting, we’re pleased to report that our network is the fastest it’s ever been–our data is faster and its footprint is smaller, and we’re continuing to make tweaks and enhancements. We tapped ROBLOX Software Engineer Yunpeng Zhu to tell us how we got there.

ROBLOX has sped up dramatically thanks to a couple of changes we’ve made in our networking infrastructure. A few of these changes were very simple, while some of them became extremely complex–it’s difficult to gauge how much faster ROBLOX is running because it’s not entirely dependent on networking, but the hardware users are playing on.

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