As a roblox developer, it is currently too hard to test multiple saves for players.
The main reason being, when I go to test in a server, I can only spawn players from player1 up, in ascending order. So if I want to test the save data on player 2, I ALWAYS have to spawn player 1 first.
This causes lag, and higher load times, that both exponentially increase as I test with more players.
Yes, there are ways around it such as adjusting your datastores, but this not only requires extra effort, it leaves us open to updating the game with the wrong stores in place and effects the validity of the tests considering it is no longer the same as what is posted online. And this still doesn’t address the issue that you have to spawn two players just to have two separate save slots.
My solution? Give us a way to choose which players to spawn. Could be something as simple as a “…” button next to the start server button. There are multiple ways you could go about this, such as being able to specify the starting player number, being able to spawn one player at a time while manually choosing the number, or adding a ui in which we can manually add each player that we want to spawn if we wanted to spawn multiple.
If this issue was addressed, it would improve my development experience because I would no longer have the road block of having to test with several players, and could simply spawn one at a time when needed. It would also improve the tools I have at my disposal for bug testing.
A current use case is with testing product purchases. Two players have a product purchase go through, the third doesn’t. In order to continue testing with the third I repeatedly have to spawn all 3 of the players.
Another possible use case is testing if an error is occurring on a player joined basis, or if it’s occurring on a player to player basis. If there was a bug that occurred every third player, but I thought it was the third player’s save itself, I could easily just spawn the players out of order to test. The only way to test a bug like this currently would be testing with friends online.
I can easily come up with many other use cases - and think this would be a great addition to studio as a whole.