I’ve been having trouble looking into some reoccuring buggy behaviour with client connections using the editor and different combinations of servertravel commands. And it’s another situation where I wonder why there isn’t more detailed pages on different subjects that people must at least try to use for different reasons.
Example:
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The handshake process is such an important flow but I found that I had to study it from the bottom up. It’s not crazy complicated, but I am lucky that I know my way around these things enough.
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Enabling the Editor feature that slows down your editor when it isn’t in focus. This option will change the client <-> server connection timings that lead to issues. These issues will end up being Heisenbug in nature where I try to observe a bug, and the behavior of the editor may change. (EDIT: I originally said Hindenbug, oops!)
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Enabling/Disabling “Run Under One Process” will also change timings which also leads to bugs in vanilla Unreal Engine with virtually no user code. This option is mentioned here, but it doesn’t explain in detail on the page
“This will load much faster but have the potential for more issues.” But which issues should I and others look out for?
- If you go into DefaultEngine.ini, you can add custom settings that drastically change the behaviour of connection timeouts and debugging. For example these:
[/Script/OnlineSubsystemUtils.IpNetDriver]
ConnectionTimeout=5.0
InitialConnectTimeout=20.0
TimeoutMultiplierForUnoptimizedBuilds=2.0
There’s sometimes documentation pages for them like this, but how do you find out about them? Which ones are relevant to you and which ones are not? I’d suggest a page like:
“having issues with your editor timing out on connect to your server instance? Try looking into these settings:”
Below is one of these settings from the header scrape but you would either find this directly in code if you knew to look inside NetDriver header file and study all the properties or a lucky google hit on similar terms. Often people will make such website blogs themselves to share their info around outside of Epic, but I propose why not just have it in the UE docs or a UE wiki of some sort?
This page is somewhat helpful, but lacks critical info. Such as that seamless travel is not supported in-editor
Some great pages do exist and I simply wish there was more of them. Take for example the Actor Lifecycle page. Critical engine information here. Nice diagram, good info for both amateurs and professionals alike. I don’t expect all pages to be as fleshed out, but I wish more could be. I also intend to share my findings as I go and continue to report things I learn myself to help fill gaps to help others, though I hope Epic starts to do this for everyone. I apologize for anything that may have come across as harsh, not been a good day trying to be productive 