Question about what this course covers

Unreal Courses Talk
#1

Hello,

I’m considering purchasing the Unreal Multiplayer course, however I’m not quite sure if the course offers what I’m looking for. Does this course demonstrate how to build a standalone C++ server for hosting on a dedicated machine? I’m not really interested in networks like steam or local client networks.

Will the course cover physics calculations and simulation of the client environment server-side? What about instancing? I signed up for the Unity (version 1) course, and built the brick breaker game. I wanted to extend the game to include achievements and score keeping server-side. What I was aiming to do was have a single server hosted on a dedicated machine which creates instances of scenes for each player that joins. These are single player scenes handled over the network to help combat cheating. There is very little in the way of Unity to help build a system like that. I’m curious if this course will help me learn how to create that kind of network in C++ for the Unreal engine.

Thank you,

Max

#2

@sampattuzzi
I can say it is designed to be an add on for those that have the unreal complete developer course or have experience in C++ and Unreal.
I cant add anything to this at this time as i only picked up the course this weekend and been working on other courses.

Hopefully Sam can give you more information on this.

#3

Thanks for the response. I also purchased the Unreal developer course but haven’t started it yet. I found the Multiplayer course while searching for information about my plans for a server-side achievement and score keeping system. I understand this course is for the Unreal Engine, and if it offers what I’m looking for then I’ll likely build the project in Unreal.

#4

Unity can do somewhat of what you ask but i didnt go into the multiplayer very much Its in the complete developer for unity but i also used a Merry Fragmas 3.0 tutorial from unity to make a multiplayer game with scores but i didnt get as far as achievements.
One of the unity RPG goals i seem to remember was how to get your game onto steam which would link into achievements but steam since changed their policies by scrapping greenlight so not sure how viable that is now.

There is a section on Steam Multiplayer in the unreal course but i have no idea what that is yet will likely find out in a few days!

Hopefully this random blast of information will help but i will be moving though the unreal multiplayer tutorial i hope today.

#5

Hey! Thanks for the information. Unfortunately it still does not answer my question. I’ll check out the Merry Fragmas tutorial, thanks for the tip.

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#6

I’m not quite sure I understand your instancing requirement. It’s certainly possible to implement the rest with Unreal and we will be showing you how that’s done. You will probably be able to use the grounding of the course to implement your exact requirements but it wont handhold you through the exact solution you’re after.

#7

Thanks for the reply, @sampattuzzi. Of course, it would be silly to assume your videos will cover my game logic.

About instancing, the best way to explain it to you would be to take World of Warcraft as an example. The game features a dungeon and raid system by which people can enter a dungeon and be placed within an instance of that dungeon. It’s the same map, but multiple people can play on that map independently. I’m interested in doing this in Unreal, i.e. from within the server, deliver instances of scenes to people who request it. In that way, a single player can be within an instance and the server can handle all the logic of the level - thereby helping to combat cheating.

Let me know if I still need to clarify further.

Thanks,

Max

#8

Ah, I see now. This may be slightly tricky with Unreal as, by default, only one map can be loaded at a time. You may need a separate process that spawns up server instances to handle this.

How confident are you with coding up a basic web server server?

#9

See this post https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/c-gameplay-programming/68296-can-i-run-multiple-server-instances-in-the-same-dedicate-server

#10

Thanks @sampattuzzi, for the reply. I’ve worked with client-server architecture in the past, so I’m very confident (in both C++ and web). The issue is specifically one of engine support. What’s nice about using Unreal to handle multiplayer is that the server comes equipped with everything it needs to calculate physics and update the Unreal clients with accurate information. Unfortunately, it appears that Unreal suffers from the same limitation that Unity suffers from, and we would have to either run only one scene at a time or load different game servers for each scene (which means opening up a great number of ports, which is not an option for me since my dedicated hosting provider only allows 20 custom port rules on their firewall).

There is an Open Source World of Warcraft emulator (https://github.com/TrinityCore/TrinityCore) on GitHub which does exactly what I’m after. It could be modified for my own games, however it would mean having to handle all the physics, map terrain approximation for pathfinding, collision and etc in a custom way. Is there really no way to do this in Unreal without a custom server implementation?

#11

Sadly, I think it’s quite en-grained in the engine. You might be able to work around the port issue if you forward traffic through the custom web server.

#12

No problem. It’s good to know the limitations of the software we’re using. Regardless, I did sign up for your Udemy course.

Max

1 Like
#13

Look forward to seeing you work.

#14

I have similar questions, and instead of creating a new thread I thought I’d tag on to this one. What type of game network architectures does this course provide?

  • Dedicated server where the server is somewhere on the net that is not one of the clients, and you’d join the game by seeing a lobby of available dedicated servers.

  • Matchmaking, where you would be connected to a dedicated server.

  • Matchmaking, where one of the clients becomes the server for the game.

Any other type of architecture?

Every unreal networking tutorial I’ve seen has been very basic, showing you just how to essentially make a single, simple game instance. All of them fall short of going end to end on how to create a full end-to-end networking solution, that includes some form of a lobby of dedicated servers and / or matchmaking. Including an example of ‘staged’ server would also be great. Something along the lines of waiting for enough people to connect in order to have a full match, starting the game, showing statistics at the end of a round, having map voting for the next session, seamlessly allowing people to join/leave during a fight.

#15

We do keep the network architecture fairly simple but I hope we give the tools to creating more complex architectures. Essentially we are using the model of a P2P game with one player hosting. This we felt was most scale-able for devs on a budget.

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