Why do chiselled blocks lag game clients?

[tibbers]

This is a question to understand what is happening behind the scenes with chiselled blocks and how they drop frames to a point of making the game unplayable at times.

I've heard from other players that the game renders each individual block down to the little tiny pieces. So if you have, say, a giant pillar that has intricately chiselled pieces spiralling upward the game "picks up" that there are 100 blocks on this 6 block high pillar? 

Also another thing I heard was when it came to light rendering on these blocks can cause a huge performance dip.

I don't know if any of this is correct. Just want to understand why when I walk into a magnificent palace or a highly detailed city my frames drop to a very noticeable point.

Cheers

Edited March 24 by tibbers

[coolAlias]

At a very basic level, graphics are rendered as flat shapes called polygons, and to reduce memory load they track these mathematically and "fill it in" when it is drawn to the screen.

For example, if your screen is 100 x 100 pixels, a single square covering all 10,000 pixels total can be stored in memory as 4 points (one for each corner of the square) and a color or 2D texture.

As you add more polygons to render, you need more information, and if multiple players are connected, it needs to get sent to each of them.

Chiseled blocks can add a whole bunch of extra polygons. More polygons = more memory and more processing required, which in turn can lead to lag if your CPU or GPU can't fully handle the load.

[Demoncyborg]

as far as i'm aware, the chiseling system is a lot more dynamic than just "rendering every single voxel", if you've used any chiseling tool mods, or checked out how it separates certain sections of a block when you'd modify it, you can see that Vintage story divides chiseled blocks into neat chunks depending on its shape. the only way for it to "render every single voxel" would be making it like, a checkered pattern of air and blocks, or something crazy like that.

so complex builds that divide each block into multiple chunks- like custom roof tiles with lots of nubs and crevices, or lots of uniquely chiseled statues, yeah, you're asking your computer to process more surfaces like coolAlias said above.

[tibbers]

Chiselling is a very important part of Vintage Story to me, what it gives to builders and their creativity is massive.

Appreciate the replies