Mootjuh: that’s the post that was the basis of my entire vehicle approach in unity. It’s a fantastic resource! I think I just need to make a toy game in UE4 first, because the concepts described in the linked post are simple to program once one understands the engine itself.
Shambler2: Thanks for the in-depth reply! I’m attempting to use the Blue Man Vehicle plugin at the moment, but my fallback is to basically do exactly what you suggest. The only reason I’m not doing that immediately is that I was warned about the necessity to write my own network replication / rollback code if I went that route. Network code is my kryptonite (at least in my real job as a devops engineer) so I’m hoping to avoid that.
Thanks both of you for taking the time to respond, it’s really appreciated.