Alright, be that the case, I have to make another point.
After being confused about this for most the of the year, I truly appreciate your willingness to elaborate on these mechanics, though I am disappointed to find out that it’s by design and not just a bug that can be fixed. That said, I have to resent the current system AND the potential, future one that was described. It’s overlooking one major disadvantage, and it’s the main one that spurred me to make this thread: Canvases that are intentionally placed to be viewed from a distance will essentially never render.
To rephrase, it isn’t just items disappearing, so much as items NEVER appearing because they’re placed in areas that people aren’t expected to be, but are still expected to see.
I can’t say if this affects tons of players, but it definitely applies to myself and the friends I’ve made in-game through our ambitious crafting. I touched on this briefly with the Coke billboard example in the OP, but I’d like to provide some grander examples that are harder for me to brush off. Please, pardon the completely shameless showboating of my condos.
In this example, I made a simple transparent graphic streteched out to act like a bridge of light. Because of the necessity for transparency, I used a default canvas. The default canvas has an origin point in the center of the object, meaning they need to be near the center of the object for it to appear.
For visitors, the end result of teleporting into the scene is this:
(FYI canvas spheres seem largely unaffected by these network constraints)
Here’s another. One of the most impactful ways I can change the scenery and feel of an entire map in an optimized way that uses very few objects is via imposing large graphics in the distance:
This isn’t purely for aesthetics either. The canvas serves as a screen that blocks the player’s view of all the other standard & workshop items that don’t have distance limitations. Your plaza also employs methods of hiding constructs and interiors out of view by extreme distances, granted it’s not so crudely done with flat pictures as I’ve done, but I feel like the point still stands if community condos are meant to take the place of player-hosted lobbies.
And you can probably imagine all the other examples that got gimped on this specific snapshot if you look in the background.
Here’s some to drive the point home.
I can’t say whether you guys planned for condos to be made with this level of extreme scale in mind or not, but regardless, this is the kind of freedom that I’ve been messing around with since launch, and it was only since earlier this year that they become impossible to properly display in-game to other players.
I know kneecapping already-implemented optimization isn’t really feasible, but I personally consider these (unintentional) creative restrictions in the favor of optimizations to be just as bad, and in my personal case, obviously worse. I hope there can be some respite.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
thanks tho, lol 