For Player:LoadCharacter() I am talking about this page: https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/api-reference/function/Player/LoadCharacter
Currently, this is the description of the method:
The LoadCharacter
Playerfunction creates a new character for the player, removing the old one. It also clears the player’sBackpackandPlayerGui. This is useful in cases where you want to reload the character without killing the player, such as when you want to load a new character appearance after changing the player’sPlayer.CharacterAppearance.
Loading a player character is not a simple process however and this page neglects to mention many of these details.
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In order to load a character, Roblox needs to know what the player is wearing. This means a web-request is made to get the player’s outfit. This outfit is not stored as players can change their looks on the website and have it update their in-game character after respawning. These web-requests take time however, so if you were to respawn a couple dozen characters in a server in a loop, your code might yield for a second or two, and maybe even more than 10 seconds if the Roblox web is acting up. This means the method should be wrapped into a coroutine or spawn function if it is important that your code does not yield!
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If a Model is parented to the StarterPlayer service and this model is called StarterCharacter, Roblox will not load the player’s character from the website and instead use the StarterCharacter model as a template for the newly spawned character. This is not documented on the page!
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Adding onto the previous point, will Player:LoadCharacter() yield when a StarterCharacter model is available in the StarterPlayer container? A template is available within the server so no web-request is required to get the player’s outfit right? I would assume that the method does not yield in that case, but again, this is not documented on the page and definitely has to be!
For Players.CharacterAutoLoads I am talking about this page: https://developer.roblox.com/en-us/api-reference/property/Players/CharacterAutoLoads
This page also neglects a detail that can easily lead to confusion for new developers.
- A player’s UI will not load until the player’s character is first initialized. So if you want to make a game with manual character spawning where your character does not exist until you’ve navigated past a menu in the game, you will actually have to spawn the character once in an out-of-bounds area, because your UI will not be initialized otherwise!