Reproduction Steps
This should repro regardless of platform or place file, but I’m on Windows8.1. I believe it started happening around the last studio patch
Expected Behavior
I expect play solo mode to launch in a new studio window
Actual Behavior
Nothing happens, regardless of what I change the keybind to. It feels like the keybind was just removed.
Issue Area: Studio Issue Type: Other Impact: High Frequency: Constantly Date First Experienced: 2022-01-06 00:01:00 (-05:00) Date Last Experienced: 2022-01-11 00:01:00 (-05:00)
To be specific, this is talking about “Play Solo” which opens Studio in a new window using the F6 shortcut. “Play” is play solo but in the same window using the F5 shortcut.
This feature has been removed, so this is not a bug. It looks like we missed the shortcut though.
We’re working to clean up, simplify, and modernize Studio. Right now there are many ways to simulate a game:
Run
Play
Play (detatched window)
Test Server / Player
Team Test
In addition to the additional maintenance required to keep each mode working, Play (detached) didn’t satisfy a unique use case like the other testing modes, and had very low usage. Unfortunately, this means it didn’t make the cut and ended up being removed.
If you are one of our fewer older users that have been using Play (detached), the recommended alternative is in-window Play mode. It functions the same way as detached Play other than not spinning up a new window.
That’s unfortunate. I understand Play is more kid-friendly, but it can take seconds for my test to start up and I prefer to look over code while I wait for it. My project is large and it just doesn’t seem right to seize up the window I’m developing on while it starts up.
There’s also no other way for me to leave a test session open while I debug a second session. It can be useful to be able to diagnose problems and start more tests when I find a rare error. Using ‘Start Server’ / ‘Play’ closes the original sessions so I can’t make changes and test a fix while leaving the original repro window open.
Play (detached) only would’ve suffered from low usage because it was deliberately left out of Studio’s ribbon bar (as far as I remember), so to use that as a reason to remove many people’s preferred mode of safely and efficiently testing their game feels pretty lame. Play (in window) hogs my workspace, risks the rare crash while in a testing session nuking my work session, and is less efficient for debugging code, and going full bore with the Test Server / Player mode is overkill 80% of the time I need to test something.
F6’s Play (detached) mode was quick, easy on the workflow, good for multitasking and debugging, and safe to use. Really irritating update, and it’s all the more frustrating that no one bothered warning or asking us about this change.
I actually never thought of the use cases for Play Solo, it was always more of an annoyance since the detached window took more than a few seconds to open in the first place, and since most of the time I had pressed F6 accidentally instead of F5. I never knew what it was exactly (until now), so it always slightly confused me when a random Studio window opened. I think it could be re-introduced, but it needs to have a dedicated button in Studio to click on with the shortcut listed so people know what the hotkey for it actually does.
This feature was crucial for development. For dealing with crashes and other issues arising from very large games, having the game played in the same instance is detrimental to testing. It’s very disappointing to see this feature just disappear overnight.
Play (detatched window) is/was very useful, mainly because if my game crashes there it will only crash that window and not my whole studio, with the new way to test the game I actually save the game before testing it out everytime, mainly because a while ago my studio crashed and I lost all the progress I made on the game that day. I would like that you could reconsider this decision.
I had no idea that Play Solo (detached) existed because it was never exposed through the immediate UI. If I had known this feature existed, I would have been using it instead of normal Play Solo because of previously mentioned use cases (still wanting to edit/view code while Play Solo is loading, mainly for larger experiences, safely launching a testing session so that the main Studio window does not crash if Play Solo does, etc).
This is extremely helpful because stupid is very prone to crashing and I also like being able to search my game while testing. Opening a dedicated server also takes WAYYYYY too long for any productive person to use all the time.
Removing play solo was a huge blunder in my opinion.
This was my main form of testing experiences as I’m sure was the case for a lot of your developers. Depreciating valuable functions used to test experiences on this platform is a step backwards. I highly urge that this is reconsidered.
We have been using play solo for years and it has been taken away from us, in an instant, we had no say.
Play solo is convenient to your developers as large games take a long time to load and unload when using the in-window alternative. The time it takes starting at a blank window is futile and takes many many seconds (depending on how big the game is), many seconds which turn into minutes, minutes which turn into hours.
Testing code, animations and VFX multiple times has now become very time consuming, valuable time which could have been used correcting errors and meeting deadlines.
Debugging with Play Solo mode has never been easier when I started using it. In in-window Play Mode, there’s cases where I forget what I’ve been debugging when I have the fix in mind. Play Solo helps me to fix the bug while testing it out.
While noting what needs fixed will fix this problem, it still saves more time and we can move on to the next progress of our development faster. Team Test with 1 Player can fix this but it doesn’t have the same data that your character has in Play mode.
In some cases, we absolutely cannot replicate the bugs until we have a way to replicate the same data you originally have and transfer it over to the Player 1 in Team Test.
EDIT: I’d like to also note that Team Test is way too slow at loading compared to Play Solo, it takes me around 5-10 debugging before I can get some specific tasks done such as improving VFXs timings and etc.
There isn’t a shortcut for this, but if you want to have something that functions similarly to Play with the detached window, simply go to the Test tab, and start a Local Server with 1 Player enabled.
I’ve used play solo - detached whenever I did not need a server or multiple players because it was the safest way to test without risking losing the studio instance to a crash. Please add this feature back.
Edit: Not to mention, now I’ve got to get used to not closing the window after done testing with F5 play solo
So is the plan to just remove this and not replace it, even after countless top devs have said they use it in their daily workflows?
This is exactly why devs feel like the studio team is making arbitrary decisions unrelated to the actual needs of developers. Most changes hurt rather than help, and harmful bugs are left around forever.
If not devs, who is the priority here? New users, since the goal is to “Modernize” studio?
