Normally when creating a test server, you get blank, grey characters that spawn. The default characters aren’t only boring to look at, but they also don’t do a very good job of testing your game. Your game could have features that depend on accessories (are projectiles blocked by accessories?) or rig type, but because there’s no variance between test players, those cases never get tested.
To reconcile this, I’ve made a plugin which converts test players to use the appearance of random friends:
This should give you better test cases in test servers and make testing less boring. The plugin doesn’t do anything special to players – it only sets player.CharacterAppearanceId – so this should be compatible with any game. This only affects test players, and users in-game or your own avatar in play solo/team test are not affected.
This is neat! I really like the idea of it. Is forcing test players to your own character’s appearance a feature? Because those test cases you mention, I can see it getting tedious to test them if half your friends don’t have certain accessory items.
Not at the moment, but I can add that in. Do you have any suggestions for how I can expose this to developers? I don’t think the amount of use it’d see warrants adding a plugin button + GUI.
I have no other ideas, it seemed straightforward to do that and have an ‘about’ section in the GUI. Any way the player can give input is a potential input method, so, watching for specific phrases in chat when testing?
Sometimes I write code in module script that is meant to be required by both clients and servers and has undefined/unexpected behavior in Play Solo, so I use test server + 1 client for solo tests in those cases.
Once I was testing specific combinations of Accessories by changing my avatar and play solo-ing. The situation above was not this situation.
I would have to explain any screenshots unless the plugin becomes wildly popular.
I think playing as friends should be the default behavior, because I think it’s cute behavior, but I wouldn’t want to be trapped in playing as a random friend all the time.
