User Launches Multiple Clients for Testing

Ayaldev testing with two clients, screenshot by Ayaldev.

Using several clients in the same local instance hasn’t been possible in VRChat for months until someone managed to do this, which could mean that the “Number of Clients” field in your SDK isn’t going to be useless anymore.

Last Saturday, Ayaldev exclaimed, “OMG! I can test with 2 clients now! Again!” According to Ayaldev, everything was synchronised during the test session. However, after the success of Ayaldev’s experiments, many others tried to repeat it by launching several clients at the same time to test a local instance, and no one confirmed achieving similar results. “Aya got it to work supposedly,” CyanLaser replied. “It didn’t work for me though.”

After we asked different content creators for explanations, Aya said, “It just worked, if you read the log... you'll see me complaining about it cuz it never worked since January-ish. Then later on it suddenly worked.” On top of that, even though it didn’t work for others, Aya claimed that “sometimes they end up in different instances, it’s like [80%] success, [20%] fail”.

Explaining this phenomenon requires understanding of how VRChat works, but Shelfen summarized the situation in a single comment, “Makes no sense, just like VRChat patches.” Unfortunately, using multiple clients in local worlds isn’t possible right now.

On the other hand, using several clients with different accounts doesn’t seem to have any issues at the moment. A lot of users do that in VRChat for various reasons, but most of them do it for common entertainment and use their second accounts for “bots” serving as additional clients in order to play music or record other people. For example, Sheppard98 uses his SheppBOT jukebox with a built-in support of services provided by Amazon Alexa for users talking to the bot.

If you want to test your world with more than just one client, you’ll have to either use your second account (both Steam and VRChat accounts work fine), or use your friends as test subjects, because everybody knows that’s what friends are for.