Thought flow:
So I want to create a game that doesn’t use the player’s character. And so I disable Players.CharacterAutoLoads. Now I would assume I can go on and make my game without the character, right?
Nope, wrong.
The initial character loading is for some reason crucial for loading everything else the game needs. For instance, things that exist in the StarterPlayer won’t get loaded, thus the player enters the game and just has a fly-cam view but nothing happens.
The bug: StarterPlayer stuff is never loaded if the character is never initially spawned.
In the past, the loading screen would get stuck too, but that doesn’t appear to happen anymore.
In order to combat this, the best way I’ve found is to spawn the player and then set their character to nil (player.Character = nil).
My assumption is that this behavior exists because a spawned character would probably mean the game has fully loaded for the player.
Is this only for online servers? When I throw a local script in StarterPlayerScripts, put CharacterAutoLoads to false and then start a Test Server, it seems to load and run the script just fine.
Here’s a quick hack to work around it so you can keep developing, put this model as a direct descendant of StarterPlayer and leave CharacterAutoLoads on: StarterCharacter.rbxm (2.2 KB)
It spawns a trivial character instead of the regular one and deletes itself after 1 second server-side. When a fix for this bug is made you can simply delete the model again and turn CharacterAutoLoads off.
This definitely sounds like a bug. I believe there was something similar I looked into a while ago regarding PlayerGuis not being loaded when CharacterAutoLoads and ResetGuiOnSpawn were configured in a non-default way.
Fixed something recently where teleports in general wouldn’t work when CharacterAutoLoads was false. It might just be broken in general, for the time being you may just want to destroy the character instead.