Seeing your post sitting here 7 days no reply… I feel you man, it took me almost 3 weeks to work through this with dedicated server and listen server, and 3 months total, just to get my networking framework to work, using PacketHandlerComponents, etc. Here’s what I found:
- Using the Steam ‘Find Servers’ is almost useless, except if you’re using app_id 480, which is just for fun.
- I don’t recommend using ‘Stand Alone’ for testing. Notwithstanding all the videos that show this working, I have NEVER gotten it to work. I’m using 4.24.2 - I’m not sure why.
- Make your own server browser. It is not difficult and you can send your own session data so that you can find, sort, connect etc.
- You need to have a client and server on separate networks. I rent a server from Kamatera for my dedicated testing. But to debug my dedicated server, I need another machine on a different network (is use my phone hotspot and a laptop)
- Not delving into C++: this will be very problematical I think, except for the most basic of tutorial level. So I’d suggest you remove this constraint from your list.
To quickly note my experience with Steam networking: I have not ever work with such a difficult networking framework in my professional career, which included more than a year of remote print driver virtualization. There is little documentation that provides any utility for someone trying to figure this out and the doc that does exist is mostly the self-evident doc:
*** example of doc entry **
bool SomeFunctionToCall(param0, param1, param2, param3, param4, param5, param6, param7, param8, param9, param10)
SomeFunctionToCall() is a function to call;
Parameters:
param0
param1
…
Returns: returns true or false
** end doc entry
I have found most of my answers through
- Metric tons of trial & error (approximately 300+ hours of building/uploading/updating
- 15th comments down in some Stackexchange replys
- Prior knowledge of network/socket programming from 25 years professional software engineering experience and applying the theory to Steams networking (which acutally does a pretty good job of matching, so you CAN use other information to help
- Read and understand as much the C++ networking code as you can, even if you don’t use the C++, it will tell you what you need to know.
I am a single engineer on a game to be released in May 2022 and have nightmares about all the trouble ticket that will be coming in when release, just for the Steam networking. by the time of release I will have developed for 2 years, 3 months and I’d estimate about 4 months on networking alone.
I think other development TEAMS using UE4 have dedicated Steam network experts working on it full-time. I don’t have those resources. Probably you don’t either.
KEEP AT IT, NEVER GIVE UP: you will eventually work it out, as I have. Just factor in 5x more time to do something than you think it will actually take. It helps.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that any question I have ever asked about Steam networking has not been answered anywhere, except for 1, that referred me to a doc link like the above example.