Headless Unity

Don't render what nobody's watching.

Long agent runs and balance grinds don't need pixels. Pick a mode per session: stream the game, drop the window, or drop rendering entirely.

Three modes, one per session

Normal hides the editor window and streams the game into the app with mouse, keyboard and audio. It's the default, and the editor is one click from being revealed.

Headless Graphics drops the editor window but keeps rendering the view.

Headless NoGraphics runs -batchmode -nographics: no window, no rendering, no GPU work. Update() ticks past 5,000 times a second instead of sixty, so a run that takes minutes finishes in seconds.

The trade: there's no picture. The Unity panel shows the editor's live log, and screenshots, video and Tuner views fail at once with NoGraphicsError. You read handle results and tagged logs instead, and the multiplayer grid needs one of the other two modes.

Why it matters

  • Minutes become seconds. NoGraphics ticks Update() past 5,000 times a second instead of sixty.
  • Nothing to rebuild. It's the same editor session, so a mode switch needs no player build.
  • Each scratchpad picks its own. One agent can grind in NoGraphics while another streams in Normal.

Switch mid-session: Normal to find the bug, NoGraphics to grind it, Normal to watch the fix. Agents call unity.setMode(), and each scratchpad keeps its own mode.

Straight answers

Headless questions.

Does multiplayer work in every mode?

Up to four instances in Normal and Headless Graphics. NoGraphics is single-player only.

Can I look at a headless session?

Not in NoGraphics, which has no picture. Switch the session back to Normal, or reveal the editor.

Related

Spend the GPU when it matters.

Stream while you watch. Drop the pixels when you don't.

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