Concerns Related to Networking and Movement

Development Programming & Scripting Multiplayer & Networking
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1

Hello everyone! How are you?! Are you fine?! Being good developers and all? Yay! Great!

So here is the thing. Lately I have been thinking about networking I started to have a huge concern in my mind regarding movement and how smooth it could be replicated.

Here is the story;

Maybe you know it, I have been working on my Unreal Fighter 2D project, a template about creating fighting games in Unreal. Now, my whole movement is based on two things; One being a Timeline, and other being Add World Offset.

You see, a Timeline with a float value constantly updates the location of the player via Add World Offset. This happens when you jump, when you get hit and all that. Also please note that I am not using player BP, my all characters are pawns.

You could say “Why don’t you test it yourself?” but I never worked on networking so testing and I am sure someone knows a thing or two related this concern.

So here are the questions I would like a lil bit input upon;

  1. Am I screwed?
  2. Is there any way to make Add
    World Offset reliable?
  3. Is there any way to make the
    movement float variable, timelines,
    and/or specific nodes having very
    high priority to update when it
    comes to networking?
  4. What do you suggest for supper
    smooth movement?

I wish I could ask what they do at SF5, but alas, I need your help/opinion about this!

Thank you!

2

hello !

for my first version of my game, I used “add world offset” on the server, and a timer function sent position of the pawn each 0.05 secs. (My v2 version use similar tech but with physics enabled and force/torque)
each client then move all other clients with an interp. For the moment with my second version I have max -3 meters from the real position for a max speed around 550 km/h. (checked with 100 ms ping).

Pawns don’t have their movement replications implanted while character BP have a basic implementation (I personaly use pawn)

You can choose in each actor there network priority.

If it can help :wink:

3

Thank you for your reply! So um, do you ever get some weird unacceptable jitters, choppy movement so to speak? I will check the priority aswell, thanks!

4

I don’t have any visible jitter with a “perfect” network, and I just tried with high ping, no packet lost nor jittering enabled … Idon’t have a real server to test, my game is in really early stage :wink:

5

I tried a timeline with Add Local Offset connected to a timeline and triggered with an event that replicated to all via server, it was indeed smooth! O.O

Thank you, my mind is clear at least for now! ^^

6

Maybe this can help you to tweak your game :

https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/finding-network-based-exploits