Yep! With ALS you will of course have to modify a number of things, but really it’s just limiting it’s ability to move in 3D but retaining it’s turning and such. Almost as easy as just unbinding the forward and backward movement and unbinding the camera from rotating with the player. That said, I’ve got everything working for both spawning drop in drop out players and the simple way (if your game supports it).
Simple way first: Just having both players already in the map, downside is you have to handle their respawns as the “default pawn” will always spawn a new default pawn. It won’t differentiate your different children we made up before. Basically just have them autopossess whichever player ID and you’re all good!
that said this makes it a pain to have to either destroy player 2 as levels start if they are single player.
The significantly more work alternative (The reason it took so long was because I was trying to test this without multiple gamepads). Drop in Drop out multiplayer! Much better for games like unravel or party games.
Pre-Setup:
Create a new game mode:
In the level BP or Gamemode (I did mine in the level BP as maybe some level don’t need the player 2 to be there or are cutscene levels where they don’t need to have controls). All this does is create another local player (the -1 means just add one player to the current count) and it immediately spawns a player controller. You can uncheck that if you set this up in a menu prior but that’s more to talk about in depth if I finish the example project to upload.
Create a new Pawn:
The game mode is going to control what players get spawned when and only one singular time.
The pawn will replace the default pawn. It’s only there to serve as a placeholder for players before they hit any buttons.
I called this actor “PressPlayToJoinActor” for simplicity.
All it does is wait for a key to be pressed from whatever player controller is assigned to it and then it tells the game mode to spawn that player.
Now on to the Gamemode: The only thing it handles is finding where players would spawn, takes in which player has requested to spawn, then chooses a specific actor to spawn. (you could also make an array variable and have them choose from it but for simplicity’s sake I just made 2 spawns.)
Lastly, for the first player I have the camera attached to them, but not the other. This was for simplicity’s sake again, but you can make a camera that follows them both together (though that’d be a whole other tutorial so I didn’t get into it).
And Voila! 2 characters who can be totally different in ability, mesh, and even classing with drop in drop out style of play. Just need to hit any button on the gamepad
Let me know if you have any questions about the process! We basically circumvented the normal UE spawning system a bit so you would have to handle respawns and such yourself.