I went into a map I have been forging and as soon as I spawned the blocks in front of me were all flashing like a strobe light. Is this a frame rate issue? They don't flash in custom games.
This is commonly called disco and is caused when too many objects are within your field of view at any given time. This will commonly occur in forge and disappear in custom games because the spawn points count towards this overall total when in forge but not in custom games.
It potentially could be a framerate issue. A lot of the time if you respawn it will disko as it loads all the objects, even in customs. Just try to cut down on your overall piece usage and you should be fine.
Depending on how many players are on the map, you could have upwards of 128 extra objects (players, weapons, corpses, etc.) that only appear in Customs. If the number of spawn points and other objects is fewer than 128, you could see problems when playing 16-player games in Customs.
Pretty sure you're wrong about the reason as to why it happens in forge but not in customs. I think it has to do with that the lighting is dynamic in forge, and that they can't change during customs.
Actually, no. All pieces have lighting calculated for them all the time, and discoing can happen in Customs if there are enough of them. Discoing is solely the result of too many objects being in the field of view. (They don't have to be visible; you just have to be looking in their direction.) The reason that discoing is less prevalent in Custom Games is because the Forge-only objects are not rendered in Customs. However, all other objects still contribute. In fact, I tested it a long time ago. In single-screen gameplay, 506 or more objects of any variety -- players, weapons, corpses, Structure objects, spawn points, et cetera -- will cause discoing. I took a popular modded canvas and moved all 505 Coliseum Walls into the Coliseum, while deleting all spawn points present. Discoing occurred after spawning an additional object (it didn't matter what kind) inside the Coliseum and looking at the entire arrangement from afar. I checked this in both Customs and Forge. There are also many published maps on many websites, ForgeHub included, suffer from discoing in Custom Games when viewing the map from one of its edges after a few players have died (since the bodies contribute to discoing, and many Forgers don't think to check for that).If Structure pieces didn't contribute to discoing, then they would literally need hundreds of other objects -- scenery, players, weapons, vehicles... Highly unlikely, given the budget usage on many maps that disco. Discoing occurs solely as a result of object count. No objects of any kind are exempt from triggering it. Additional objects (players, etc.) will be present on the map at run-time that are not present in hastily-performed tests or in Forge. As for testing for disco... Basically, take the number of Forge-only objects you have on your map. This is an estimate, but if the number of Forge-only objects is greater than or equal to 136 objects and you do not experience discoing in Forge, then your map should not disco in typical situations occurring within a 16-player Custom Game.