Recoil:Headless and Dedicated

1. Overview

Recoil builds some **extra binaries** that **behave differently** to the primary 'spring.exe' one. This guide briefly describes what they do and when to use them.

1. 1. Headless

The headless build **only does the simulation** and does **not do any rendering**.

- Widgets still work** and are the main way to provide input, all rendering-related call-ins and call-outs just do nothing.

It is **great for automated tasks** such as:

* gathering **data from replays, general analysis**. Spectate a replay, use a widget to gather data.
* simulating **AI vs AI** games (either for AI development, or just to produce something analyzable in conjunction with the above).
* simulate games played on a dedicated binary, to **verify results**. See below.
* be a game server for a multiplayer game, though only **on limited scale** (perhaps for important games like tournaments). See below.

1. 1. Dedicated (aka dedi)

Simulating games can get fairly heavy, such that a game server would **struggle to simulate more than a handful**. However, players simulate the game anyway, so **a server technically doesn't need to** - this is the idea behind the dedicated binary. It only collects and **relays network traffic without running the simulation**.

Typically, dedicated servers are used for **automated hosting in large games** since they are quite lightweight. In theory this leaves games without a single source of truth, but **replays are still produced** which can be ran for verification **later, as needed**.