When attempting to launch Play Solo in Roblox Studio with a VPN in use, the viewport window will hang (like it always does for a quick moment before loading everything in) indefinitely.
I’m using ProtonVPN, though past reports may indicate this isn’t strictly a Proton issue. Here’s one from NordVPN as well as another for ProtonVPN.
Even though I use Roblox logged in, I found that the site frequently tossed HTTP 429 errors for loading larger thumbnails (catalog, inventory, avatar APIs are the main culprits). Services like YouTube & Google which easily have hundreds of other users connected to the same VPN, watching videos or using the search engines, I have an exceptional service on without any slowdowns, as long as I’m logged into my Google account to use the service that is.
My solution for the website was to use split tunneling, a feature ProtonVPN offers to exclude/include apps/IPs from the VPN connection. I used Roblox’s (publicly available) IP address range, 128.116.0.0/17, and everything worked perfectly afterwards. I did select the Roblox apps as shown below, but they don’t seem to be the fix here.
However, when attempting to start a play test session in Studio, this issue pops up. I tried using WireShark to see if I could inspect the network traffic for Studio and possibly exclude another range that Roblox uses, but unfortunately I couldn’t comprehend how to do this and gave up. The closest I got to this was seeing another service Roblox Studio was using, “Akamai Technologies”, which wasn’t mapped to my exclude list.
Some additional things to note:
- When disconnected from the VPN, play solo works as expected.
- Disabling all of my Studio plugins & relaunching didn’t fix the issue.
- Switching VPN servers in different states failed to alleviate the issue.
- This occurs for both Team Create & local place files.