As some of you may be aware, I recently moved from Torque 3D to Unreal Engine and part of this process has been to move my game Re-Spawn across to the new engine. The reasons for my moving are irrelevant, but I thought I would share the one feature of Re-Spawn called FlowUI.
Basically FlowUI forms part of my Game Flow product and uses a HTML Rendered UI for the game. While I was developing Re-Spawn (not that I have stopped, but that is beside the point) I started coming across various needs for the game that were not necessarily covered by the game engine itself. Things like master servers, license keys, achievements, and other standard game features; obviously the game engine is there to help you make a game and I wouldn’t expect the game engine to provide me with these and so I started working on my own services that would eventually become Game Flow.
Game Flow is a technology stack that provides game developers with functions and features that include but are not limited to the ones listed below:
- Scalable, Robust, and Lightweight Master Server
- Scalable, Robust, and Lightweight Game Update Server
- Scalable, Robust, and Lightweight Achievements and Statistics Server
- Secure Encrypted Communication between the Interconnected Services
- Secure Server License for Official Servers
- Secure Player Profile Storage on Client Machines
- Secure Player Storage and Allocation of Achievements and Statistics
- Web Based Server Control Panel (Game Changer)
- Web Based Game GUI that is Theme-able and Supports Internationalisation (Ditributed UI)
- and many more…
There are a few minor rendering issues, but these will be easy enough to resolve, I just wanted to make sure I could get everything working. 8-}
Here are some screen shots of FlowUI for Re-Spawn currently running in UE4.
FlowUI running as a default website:
FlowUI running in UE4:
FlowUI player statistics in UE4:
FlowUI leaderboard in UE4:
FlowUI register and error in UE4:
FlowUI host game in UE4:
FlowUI keyboard settings in UE4:
You can read the original blog post of what FlowUI is on the original blog post I did while using Torque 3D here.
The next steps are now to start migrating art and assets, gameplay, and wiring the UI in to UE4 using the JavaScript callbacks.