I've heard that the rendering loop is tied in with physics step rate, hence the 60 fps limit. However any time something is added or removed framerate drops to about 40 for a short burst which is very annoying. This is also a sign that the engine is loaded with gordian knots which would be ok for when roblox was in alpha/early-beta and testing, but is very difficult and time consuming to change without breaking a majority of code base in mass retail.
My proposed solution is to have a separate team dedicated to reworking the engine from the ground up with an entity component system which will vastly improve work ability. I saw an improvement when the blog post about featherweight parts used unique IDs paired to a static set of properties.
Another problem arises from the instance inheritance system. All types of instances (parts, meshes, gfx, sound, etc.) all eventually inherit from the base instance which holds work space and lighting. This has a large impact on performance as the c++ classes holding the data cannot be contiguous in size to store in a linear region of memory. They are also riddled with pointer vectors chaining to children which mean the processor has to scan memory wildly when GetChildren() is called. This causes many cache misses and memory is ludicrously slower compared to the onboard SRAM cache. |