Advice on Listen and Dedicated Servers?

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
1

Hello,

I’m building a cooperative four-player game. The plan is to eventually sell it on Steam.

I never intend to display a server list. I plan on only allowing joining locally and through friend invites via Steam. I’ve seen some warnings around that movement replication for listen servers in UE4 is poorly supported.

My question is: Is it acceptable and performant to make a game with UE4 that only supports listen servers?

Also, as a player, do you feel annoyed when listen servers are the only option and one of the players must host?

Any advice to elaborate on the current outlook on listen and dedicated servers with UE4 and Steam would be appreciated.

Cheers.

2

What kind of game is it? How big is the world? Is the game world suppose to be up 24/7? It all depends on your needs.

In most cases listen server is fine

3

Thanks for your response.

The game is a four-player space shooter. There is no persistent world. Instead, the game is divided into levels. Much like *Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime *or Overcooked. And no, I don’t intend to show a server list that people can choose from, I only want to enable multiplayer via invite so the server doesn’t need to run all of the time.

4

First of all, the only way to get invites working is if you have a steam code (480 doesn’t work, I’ve tried). And in my experience listen servers work fine with movement. I’m making a fast paced FPS, and every movement road block, I’ve surpassed with a little tweaking of variables, and all I’m using is listen servers.

5

Thanks for your input, Capn.

Another subject I’d like to ask for advice on is, how different does the programming look for games that use dedicated servers or listen servers?

Is it common to program with only listen servers in mind because it requires very little tweaking afterwards to adapt such a codebase to support dedicated servers for instance?

Cheers.