I’ve recently started diving into multiplayer in Unreal Engine (mostly Blueprint-based for now), and I’m currently prototyping a third-person shooter game where smooth movement and responsive animation are really important.
I’ve set up basic replication: the character is replicating movement, and I’m using Multicast events to trigger animations (like shooting, jumping, and reloading). Everything works fine on the local client, but when I view other players (remote clients), I notice:
Jittery or snapping movement when they change direction
Animations sometimes don’t sync or play late (especially reloads or transitions)
Occasionally, the remote character appears to slide instead of walk, even though the animation should be playing
I’ve already tried:
Enabling Use Controller Rotation Yaw + setting movement replication to true
Using Montage_Play on both client and multicast events
Calling movement logic on the server, then broadcasting animation via multicast
But the issue persists — and it gets worse with higher ping values during tests.
Here’s what I’d love help with:
What’s the best practice to sync animation and movement for replicated characters? Should I avoid using multicast for animations and instead rely on replicated variables?
How do experienced devs deal with latency compensation for things like “hit reactions” or footstep syncs that feel off on remote clients?
Are there key replication settings in the Character Movement Component or Animation Blueprint I might be missing?
Should I move some logic into C++ to handle it more reliably, or is Blueprint sufficient with proper setup?
Lastly, is there a reliable example or template project that demonstrates clean multiplayer character movement and animation syncing?
I know this is a common hurdle for many starting with multiplayer, and I’d really appreciate any tips, examples, or even breakdowns of how your teams solve it.
CMC already has networked character movement implemented as well as client-side prediction, server movement correction. Jump, crouch, swimming, flying movement modes etc etc.
If you have any plans to actually publish this project (Steam/EOS etc) then your project needs to be C++ based. You can do everything in BP gameplay/character wise, but the project needs to be compiled from source, so C++ base project.
EOS, STEAM and plenty of other core systems need to be C++ based in order to package and publish.
You will never perfectly sync movement, animation, actions etc in a multiplayer (networked) environment. Everybody has latency. You may have a 15ms ping, but other players may have 100ms pings.
Your actions are executed in real time as you input them. These actions are RPC’d to the server which takes 50% ping to get there. The server reproduces those actions (1 server tick) and replicates the results (data) to other clients (50% receivers ping). Each of these clients uses the updated data to simulate their copy of the game.
So your input of a jump, although it happens instantly on your screen, takes n time to be simulated on another players screen.
50% your ping + 100% server tick interval + 50% receivers ping + Game thread processing + render thread processing.
Overall process with CMC is
Input action → Can I do this movement → Apply movement locally
RPC Server that you did Action
Server → Can I do this movement → Apply movement
Client to Server RPC’s, Server does action sets “variables”… replicated states, floats, ints, bools etc
The replication system will handle sending the state variables to all other clients.
The clients will use those variables to update the simulated proxies accordingly.
For montage based actions, like swinging a sword. You’d input the action which calls for your client to play a montage. You’d RPC the server to swing. It would execute a Multicast that has itself and simulated proxies to execute an event that executes the montage. Key here is excluding the owning client from repeating the action.
See Opening statement for #1 Above. You cannot “Overcome” latency. Everything you see another player do is always a past event. Your simulation is always catching up to what the server sees of other players. By the time you get it the servers simulation has already moved along.
Simplify the data and amount of it that you send. This lowers the network footprint (saturation) which reduces the chance that the replication subsystem doesn’t send an important update.
Also, not everything needs to be replicated. For example footsteps. These are 100% client side managed. You use the animation sequence to fire an anim notify when the foot is planted. This way your not getting step audio when a player on screen isn’t moving.
Heavy math and sizeable/complex loops should be C++.
Lyra is a good example of how to do multiplayer. It’s mostly C++ and it heavily uses other pre-packaged functionality like GamePlay Ability System etc. Which in my opinion is overboard/heavy for most use cases. Once you get a solid grasp of UE’s inner workings and flow you’d be able to write a streamlined performant system that caters specifically to your needs.
Great question! Handling replicated movement smoothly in Unreal can be tricky. I’ve found that using CharacterMovementComponent’s built-in replication, combined with Root Motion for animations, helps minimize jitter for remote clients. Also, double-check your network smoothing settings — they make a big difference.
