As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to test changes that require proper networking in Studio.
It would be awesome if we had a single button that launched a hidden server in the background (not as a new window) and ran the player/client window in the existing Studio window. This would look like Play Solo mode but it would have proper networking!
Being able to only see the client state would be fine with me. I can launch the full Server + Player test environments if I need more info. Being able to see both the server and client outputs in “fast test server” mode would be a great compromise between no server state and full test server mode, though.
This concept is similar to how some games run single-player/solo mode. Some games will launch a hidden local server and connect the client to the local server to play the single-player game. It looks like one instance of the game (just like Play Solo does), but it’s actually two. This sort of environment in Roblox would be great for easy networking tests without having to launch two new windows. I think Minecraft’s single-player mode works this way.
This would be alot easier to achieve if studio didn’t launch a whole new window for each viewport versus just opening a new tab within studio. Studio’s launch time in particular is the bottleneck here.
Having the server and player screens all in one window would be nice, but it would not be good in all cases. Being able to see multiple viewports and outputs or other widgets at the same time can sometime be really useful. Combine-to-one-window would be a nice option anyway, and could in-fact replace a “Fast Test Server” option. I did not want to make a feature request with too great of a scope, though.
It’s true that Studio’s start-up time is what makes this process so slow. Even with fast start-up time, Fast Test Servers would still be useful. I think that Fast Test Servers can cut out a lot of that start-up time since creating all of the Studio tools and logging in has already been done. This is similar to how Play Solo creates a new game environment but is fast because it doesn’t have to create an all-new application environment.