Finished!

I completed the course! Huzzah!

What I found good about this lecture
First, I want to reiterate that this course has been invaluable in helping me get up to speed very rapidly on a topic that I needed to learn for a project at work. Besides that, I’ve always been interested in multiplayer technology. I still remember fumbling around with Winsock more than a decade ago while trying to develop a multiplayer version of Pong. Working directly with sockets and packets is an enriching experience, but it is great to have APIs like UE4’s Online Subsystem so that I can focus more on higher level multiplayer concepts. I loved that this course provided in-depth explanations regarding UE4 multiplayer support and networking in general, as well as touching on bonus topics such as basic physics and UI.

What could be improved
It’s hard to suggest further improvement to a course that already delivers many hours of excellent content. I see that others have suggested a section on dedicated servers and I mildly agree that it would be a reasonable addition to the course. Aside from that, other courses from the GameDev.tv team tend to have at least one or more sections with a mostly to fully fleshed out game. This course already provides an excellent starting point for building a game that supports multiplayer but I think it would be a good learning experience (not to mention fun!) to build a complete game that combines the concepts from the previous lectures and perhaps introduces new ones. Sam had mentioned in a forum post about putting together a segment that focused on RTS gameplay. I think this course might be a great place for such a game - it would be interesting to examine how synchronization is handled in a complex simulation as RTS games tend to be.

Final Thoughts
Many thanks to the GameDev.tv team for producing this fantastic course, and kudos to Sam for keeping the lectures interesting, concise, and fun! I’ll definitely be revisiting most of the lectures in this course as I continue making progress on both professional and personal projects. I’m actually in the early stages of Battle Tank from the main UE4 course and my goal is to apply the concepts from this course to the game once I have completed the section. Interestingly, years ago I created a GDD for a multiplayer game that involved combat between tanks, mechs, and some sort of flying craft. With Battle Tank as an excellent (practically ideal) starting point and the multiplayer components from this course applied, I may yet see that game become a reality! :smiley:

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Thanks for this summary, Pyro! Really glad you got through the whole thing :slight_smile:

As much as I would love to do a more full game, they tend not to be the best thing to teach. To make a real game there is a lot of tedious work that doesn’t translate very well into lectures. In these sections I tried to keep it project based but focused on the learning outcomes.

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