Hey, everyone!
To make a long story short, I am currently formulating a game intended to be played by 4 players over 5 separate screens (one screen for each individual player, and a screen that shares information between every player, each window would essentially only be its own viewport). I’ve seen a lot of Unreal Engine 5 discussions/videos showcasing multiple game windows running out of a single project, however, the topic is so niche that I can’t exactly discern whether what I am looking for is possible. Before I delve too deeply into this project, I wanted to do some deeper research into the logistics of the concept–do any of you know anything about how possible this would be?
Hey there @Cleeeps! Welcome to the community! So just to clarify your use case, you just need to be able to run multiple instances of the game and connect to a local server instance on the same device? Generally this is already possible while just running the server and launching clients on the same computer and connecting locally to that server. That said, this could get complicated when trying to distribute to players if that isn’t the vision.
To clarify, this project isn’t exactly intended to be distributed–its for a project that is specifically intended to be shown as an art installation, so to speak. The ultimate show-piece is intended to resemble an arcade cabinet, with multiple screens connected to the same machine, and running a single instance of a project (In theory, of course, I believe the hardware we are working with is capable of meeting these expectations).
That said, I’ve seen people addressing similar problems by using local servers and multiple instances of the game connected to a single server–is that an effective way to solve this problem? I’m looking to have the “main” screen mostly displaying UI elements (such as a map), and the other 4 screens showing individual player viewports exploring the same 3D environment simultaneously, with 4 controllers plugged into the computer allowing each player to control their respective Player Controller. As I understand, this would be possible using local servers, but would there be an alternative method that would be more suited to this goal?
After reading a bit more into your use case, it seems nDisplay might be more effective, though it’s technically for multiple machines in the network instead of one machine running all instances. I’m digging a bit to find a post where I had helped a user using nDisplay that was making a multi-monitor multiplayer bee game/art display.
Give the overview a read and let me know if that seems a bit more in line with your use case!
Ah, thank you for sharing this!
We’ve put development on the project on pause in favor of pursuing another endeavor, however, knowing that this exists is rad.
nDisplay could absolutely be a solution for my problem, especially if we tweaked how we wanted to go about incorporating multiple screens into the game. I will absolutely be giving this a further look, when I go back to this project!