Please expose all of the steamworks online sub-system to Blueprints, This would be so awesome not having to use C++ for this and you would be able to make higher quality multiplayer games with Blueprint.
Things I would especially like to see is access to things like the Mann.Co store item system and Steam trading system so that you could have an in-game economy.
Yeah, Steamworks is in a pretty rough place at the moment. I had quite the challenge getting leaderboards and stats working in my game. Would be nice to have BP nodes to handle that stuff.
I don’t think it’s needed to do that because if you’re going to get a game out on steam you might as well get somebody (or write yourself) some code or tinker with the engine a bit. What needs to be done with steam is make the integration easier. Especially fix the version declaration chaos; the wiki tutorial is not sufficient to change the version of the steam sdk you use. You need to change the version in a gazillion of modules’ build.cs including Automation, Rules,Steamworks, and much more…
Just to give some clarification to what Epic is doing here, I though I would comment with some info. Though we aren’t exposing Steamworks directly, we’re giving access to common interfaces through implementation. As that progresses, you will have more access to Steamworks data.
Good to see some official feedback here
Could you probably give us some insight about your plans regarding the progress of the implementation? What can we expect and when?
Unfortunately we don’t have a reliable timeframe for those changes, but the overall plan is to expose more functionality that is available in C++ already. However, we don’t have any plans to expose platform-specific OSS features.
mordentral, the creator of the plugin already commented on the thread.
At the end of the day, plugin support is amazing and greatly appreciated, but there are some dangers with using a plugin for a mission critical function of the game. If the plugin author ever abandons the project for any reason and you don’t know how to maintain it yourself, you’re suddenly unable to ever update your engine version without hiring a programmer to port the code over. You’re also missing out on any official tutorial content that Epic may put out, since they won’t be designing their lessons with a third party plugin in mind. And of course, a single person or small team can’t test something as thoroughly as Epic, nor can they always dedicate the time to fixing bugs as quickly as them.
It’s the same situation as a lot of things people have developed as plugins, such as world origin rebasing in multiplayer or VXGI. A plugin, and a free plugin nonetheless, is no replacement for official support. Even if it was Epic just saying “Yes we will integrate and officially support this plugin”, that still carries a lot of weight behind it and shouldn’t be taken lightly.