I’ve decided to learn UE4 as I build my long term game of choice, which is a
Trading Adventure Game
The graphics and world building in UE4 seem very straight forward.
I am looking for suggestions to help with the backend database integration for the trading/market end of the game.
I am not a programmer and was hoping to just master the Blueprint side of the game to accomplish the database side of things.
Is this reasonable to consider.
Can someone direct me to a book, course, etc… that would be of help when designing the market backend for this type of game, and then I could translate the meanings into Blueprint setups?
Blueprint can be thought of as a scripting language (like JavaScript or LUA or whatever.) Thus, you can build a trading system with Blueprint for the front end.
Building the entire trading system in Blueprint isn’t really possible, even if you can get everyone to connect to the same server, because things like “atomic commit to file” which are important to avoid item duplication or other trade corruption are not part of the Unreal Engine.
Thus, you probably want to build your trading system as a web service, similar to any other web site (but as an API, without fancy web graphics) on top of an application server and a database.
However, there are no web services nodes available for Blueprint. Thus, you’d probably need a programmer to implement Blueprint nodes that expose your trading system. Then you can call those from Blueprint.
Couldn’t you just make an atomic commit using booleans in your blueprint? Player A accepts trade(Set Bool), Player B accepts trade(Set Bool), items transfer ownership(Set Bool), then compare bools and execute.
Maybe if you are making a High Speed Trading terminal for Wall Street that might not be acceptable, but for a game?
I am also looking for some database integration. I understand some developers are working on XML solutions so I am patiently awaiting something on that end. I have time before I need the database anyway.
Don’t know of any books, but if there is a simple book that could teach me enough to implement such a thing I too would be interested.
I mean a trading merchant style game, such with a market with many many items and many AI characters also participating in the market.
Not merely a trade between players. It will be a single player game against AI merchants.
As mentioned above, this is the last part of my game puzzle, as I am working on getting the world built first, but want to study the database integration along the way.
It’s not going to be an online game, so didn’t consider an API or MySQL setup, and a full SQL database is overkill. I am at a loss in the beginning here as to which is the common
database system devs use for stand alone games and game progress saves.
From my modding experience, I would say that XML is an often used storage system for games of all types that have a lot of data they want to organize and expose.
There could be better ways though, as I have only dipped my toe in when it comes to this kind of stuff.
XML is good for static data that they need to refference quickly but for changing and dynamic data then a proper database is better something like sqlite intergration would be good or maybe even reading CSV could be done via c++
Cool. I guess I would be in the same boat as the OP. Is there a method that would be generally preferred with UE4? Or are there any examples databases being implemented using blueprint?