Interchangeable Simulated Headless Clients When Testing

Prologue

When I’m working on a project that has many things related to network replication I want to test the ability of my games code to see how it deals with a vast amount of simulated players, this could be to see how many players interact with the code I’ve built on or to see how physics behave during runtime.

Which I can but at the cost of severe performance drawbacks, which I’ve explained underneath.


The problem

The problem that studio presents when simulating players via the test tab on Studio is that it doesn’t give the option for having clients run as a headless client or to run as a window that renders (gui). This results in the developers hardware being expected to render many windows which regardless more than two on most machines starts to become very resource intensive, the inability to interchange through headless and gui results in requiring a higher end machine to deal with the performance overhead that this brings.


Summary

I would simply want to switch to rendering or headless for specific clients during run-time so that I can test the game on specific clients whilst the others aren’t rendering and aren’t causing a performance issue. I really hope this is addressed because I can’t simulate 7 players at the moment because it’s causing heavy strain on my GPU & CPU due to the workloads presented.

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I wish Roblox gave ability to customize how simulated clients are handled
So you can choose between whether you want a window for each client or not, sometimes i want to just only spawn some certain amount of players without windows so i can test specific stuff about them or just have some fun lol

Perhaps also an option to create a LocalPlayer for Server so i can play directly trough Server window. (Similar to Unity Mirror’s Host + Client) because i kinda dont want thousand of studio windows to test 1 thing whom i prob stop session and fix code and restart it. Now sure, Play Solo can be seen as both Client and Server even if server tasks are seperated it still has 1 window but you can’t add more players to current play solo session without opening a server window, add player 1, player 2, etc