As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard/too much work to create fake players for testing various features in a game. You can test using a local server in studio, but it’d be much more useful to be able to do this in a live game at will.
I’m requesting an official way to do this using an API called BotService
BotService would let you create and control fake players
Running N players locally in studio with the entire client and server memory overhead of my games can be untenable, especially for large open world games with many players. So if we could run spoof clients on Roblox servers and control them remotely, this would solve this issue which would improve my development experience because I’d be able to test a lot more online without having to bother QA testers every iteration
Bots can be extremely valuable in creating multiplayer games. Games that require teams of 5 or more players can be difficult to get off the ground as you need many players at once to start a match - and no one wants to wait for players to join. And so I wouldn’t stop at just having bots just for private experiences when they can solve many design problems in live servers as well.
Almost all triple A multiplayer games use bots in some form to help players get started, be it Fortnite populating beginner lobbies with bots to give new players a chance, or Rocket League that let’s you practice against AI opponents.
There’s an argument that “well, you can make your own bot players, just write a wrapper”, but that heavily downplays how much work is required and how some game architectures simply aren’t able to fit in such features. Any existing RemoteEvents and RemoteFunctions that would communicate with players would need to be restructured to work with custom bot implementations that run on the server, so a dedicated ‘environment’ that lets us reuse such network gateways would be a heavy weight off the shoulders.
Great request, here are some features that I would like for these bots to have included so that they are just not lobotomized mannequins:
Dress the bots in various types of clothing and body shapes/sizes for balancing testing.
Allow bots to have different account configurations, such as region-specific policies, age-restricted settings, or parental controls, for compliance testing.
Test possible accessibility options by having bots emulate certain needs.
Bots can activate coordinated inputs (or randomly generated) in order to test gameplay mechanics.
Allow bots to interact with the game’s UI, perform fake purchases, or simulate trades to stress test the economy.
Taking control of a bot’s client to view the game from their perspective for debugging.
In the future we could even see bots evolving beyond development tools and serve as active real-like players, filling servers for low player count games or private experiences. This would be beneficial for experiences that require high active user participation (such as minigames or FPS shooters).
Are these games set to private? I don’t understand this terminology. I’d like to use this service both Studio and Live, no matter the game’s availability status.
I’ve been wishing before for that to exist. Because making NPCs replicate a player is difficult. (depends on what I want to make the NPC do, so not all NPCs are difficult to create)
It would makes me happy if I test bots that can chat in my Roblox Studio ,this can be better if you add bots in a tag game if the server lack of players
not sure what I was thinking there