Advanced Sessions Plugin

Development Programming & Scripting
3360

Hello everyone,

I have a problem, when I shipped my game, only 3 people out of 5 were able to create and join sessions, they were able to play together without problem.
For me and another friend, impossible, we cannot create there, cannot join there. We are connected to Steam, but nothing works. I tried to remove the Steam Socket and it got worse. We stopped firewalls and others, same no results. I created my game on Unreal Engine 5. Based on blueprint, I use a Steam listening server, with port 27015. In development mode everything works for the 5 of us, but not in the shipping version. Iā€™m lost, I donā€™t understand how this could be possibleā€¦

3361

did you find an answer for this? Iā€™m having an issue where I can send a friend an invite to the session with ā€˜send session invite to friendā€™ but nothing happens when accepting the invite, Iā€™m wondering if ā€˜allow join via presence friends onlyā€™ needs to be checked - but at the same time doesnā€™t that mean ā€˜allow join via presenceā€™ needs to be unchecked? will that break the logic for allowing people to browse and join the server? - any help is appreciated!

3362

Do you have region locking or are you on the test app id which has it by default? It seperates players into buckets based on their steam download region.

3363

Ah, Iā€™m not sure about region locking or how to know if I amā€¦ What I can say is that the game is being tested on Steam as a shipping build using my own steam app ID. (downloaded and installed via Steam)

3364

And what about the ping returning 9999ā€¦ does anyone have a solution for that?

3365

Over steam you wonā€™t get a valid ping unless you enable Steam Authentication, which for a game you intend to release on steam you really should be doing.

See the Steam Online Authentication section

1 Like
3366

okay @mordentral I will take that on board, I have added the necessary code to my defaultengine.ini file, do you happen to know how I might implement the ping calculation now? At the moment my code is this:

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3367

Steam authentication pulls it during the auth process, it should auto fill.

1 Like
3368

Okay great, I was just about to go down a steam sockets rabbit hole, but I guess ill disable that plugin now - thanks!

3369

Well to update the ping situation, the Steam Sockets plugin calculated ping automatically. But despite showing joinable players and their ping, it broke session joining, I assume because it is using a different subsystem than the one set up by the advanced sessions pluginā€¦ So, back to square one.

3370

I said to use the steam authentication, not sockets. And no it still uses steam subststem and advanced sessions doesnā€™t care which subsystem is active, its just calling functions on whatever the active subsystem is.

3371

I seeā€¦ I used both sockets and authentication, but I couldnā€™t join sessions so I removed sockets and the ping went back to 9999. I still couldnā€™t join a session so I removed authentication too. Then I could join sessions again. Maybe thereā€™s another step required other than adding the code in the engine.ini file?

3372

Hi all, I was looking to see if anyone had a similar issue, but havenā€™t seen a response in the thread for it. Using UE 5.3.2, Iā€™ve done everything I normally do in other version when I set up the use of this plugin, project is a hybrid blueprint/c++, the plugin is in the engine plugins directory. Anytime the plugin is activated and the engine restarted it crashes. If I use the plugin directly in the project folder I can package a build, but it crashes on launch.
This was the crash error from the engine:

Fatal error!

Unhandled Exception: 0xc06d007e

0x00007ff96f62cf19 KERNELBASE.dll!UnknownFunction
0x0000023dc059f974 UnrealEditor-AdvancedSteamSessions.dll!__delayLoadHelper2() [D:\a_work\1\s\src\vctools\delayimp\delayhlp.cpp:312]
0x0000023dc059e708 UnrealEditor-AdvancedSteamSessions.dll!_tailMerge_steam_api64_dll()
0x0000023dc05949cc UnrealEditor-AdvancedSteamSessions.dll!USteamNotificationsSubsystem::USteamNotificationsSubsystem() [D:\Documents\Unreal Projects\VRExpPluginExp\Plugins\AdvancedSessions\AdvancedSteamSessions\Source\AdvancedSteamSessions\Classes\SteamNotificationsSubsystem.h:35]
0x00007ff8e623d412 UnrealEditor-CoreUObject.dll!UnknownFunction
0x00007ff8e625d163 UnrealEditor-CoreUObject.dll!UnknownFunction
0x00007ff8e658e9d9 UnrealEditor-CoreUObject.dll!UnknownFunction
0x00007ff8e656b410 UnrealEditor-CoreUObject.dll!UnknownFunction
0x00007ff8e641abc5 UnrealEditor-CoreUObject.dll!UnknownFunction
0x00007ff8e0f49163 UnrealEditor-Core.dll!UnknownFunction
0x00007ff8e0f7584b UnrealEditor-Core.dll!UnknownFunction
0x00007ff916de87ee UnrealEditor-Projects.dll!UnknownFunction
0x00007ff916e056c3 UnrealEditor-Projects.dll!UnknownFunction
0x00007ff916de801a UnrealEditor-Projects.dll!UnknownFunction
0x00007ff6667e2463 UnrealEditor.exe!UnknownFunction
0x00007ff6667e634f UnrealEditor.exe!UnknownFunction
0x00007ff6667dcfb6 UnrealEditor.exe!UnknownFunction
0x00007ff6667dd37a UnrealEditor.exe!UnknownFunction
0x00007ff6667e0854 UnrealEditor.exe!UnknownFunction
0x00007ff6667f6984 UnrealEditor.exe!UnknownFunction
0x00007ff6667f9d7a UnrealEditor.exe!UnknownFunction
0x00007ff9707e7344 KERNEL32.DLL!UnknownFunction

3373

Enable the steam subsystem and make sure you are on the latest AS version

3374

oh jeebus, what a rookie mistake, steam subsystem not enabled, canā€™t believe itā€¦ Thanks for that!

3375

Its easier to have that issue in 5.3 because it used to auto enable since steam sessions required it. But in 5.3 epic broke something with the steam subsystem and it was crashing consistently even if I didnā€™t use anything from it when it was referenced, so I had to rip the references out.

3376

Hi !
Using AdvancedSessions and AdvancedSessionsSteam in UE 5.3.

Currently developing Menus with CommonUI.
Everything works fine when I am not connected to Steam, but when I am, I cannot use the Gamepad.

Is there a way to fix this ?

Thanks.

EDIT : Not related to Advanced Sessions Plugin.
Sorry about that.

EDIT2 : Works in Shipping Build, not in Dev Build

3378

How are we supposed to do error handling using this plugin?

Say I have the code below and it fails, and prints that I already have a session on-going. Sure, I can read that in the logs but how can I know that from the blueprint? What if I want to display an error message that says more than ā€œjoining failedā€?

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3379

One way to do it is to have a Boolean (ex: HasJoinedSession, false default) inside Game Instance, and when a player joins/hosts a session set that to True, when he leaves/is kicked set that to False.

On On Failure you can either create a Widget with the message that you want, or switch to a Canvas inside the widget that has that message already.

3380

How can you update a value for one of the extra settings? As a practical example let say you have this:

image

When editing I tried to do the following:

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image1075Ɨ387 117 KB

On the host side the value for Code does get updated to the new random string when calling

image

But unfortunately on client side it still gets the original value which means that this isnā€™t the way to do it, so how is it the correct way to do it?

Also @mordentral, is it possible to add a Make Literal Session Property Array String (/the other types)? Right now I can kinda simulate an array by adding a separator between the values, but having an array would be better for working with the value.

Thank you for the plugin!

//Edit1: After some more testing the Extra Settings values do get changed for the session itself, only that the changes are not replicated automatically to everyone, but new players that join the session will have the updated values.

//Edit2: I tired to add inside the controller the function that changes the value and be called on each player controller, but still the same, the value does not change on connected clients, only on new clients.

So I guess one way to solve this problem would be to save those settings as variables inside the Game State and when the host changes some settings related to the session, change the variables inside the Game State as well, to reflect the new changes.

One situation is that you add a password for the session and give the option to change the password once the session is started. You will save that password as a Make Literal Session Property String inside the Extra Settings but also inside the Game State. When a player wants to join the session you will check the password from Extra Settings with what he/she is giving. If it is correct then he/she can join. Now when the host changes the password, you will update the value inside the session Extra Settings which in turn will be updated for new players that join, but also update the value inside Game State. This value will be used by the rest of the players so they have an option to share the password for the session as well, and not only the host.