How To Have Players of Game Send Message To Devs?

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
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Hi, I am in Ue5.7, you can do print strings which will show a message on the screen. Is there however a way to send a premade message from the person playing the game to the developers itself via blueprints?

The only thing I think I might have is discord or email that I might check often enough for messages. I do not use github at all and know i wouldn’t check that. Didn’t know if there was a way to do this so I can catch stupid mistakes I may have done that may not have caused a crash (i.e., I used an is valid node, that did not find a component, and didnt fire off what I intended, so i want to get notified by a premade message so I can fix what I didn’t account for).

Is this at all possible in blueprints?

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Not with BP. Have to do it in C++.

Add the HTTP and JSON modules and then you could setup an API to send them to a web server.

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@Rev0verDrive Interesting, your response brought me to a in built plugin that we can enable called HTTPBlueprint which allows for the “HTTPRequest node in blueprints once enabled. I think one is able to post to discord using webhooks. I tried putting the webhook url and then the word “test” connected up to the body input of that node and it does say the request contains invalid json as if it could work. Don’t suppose you have any idea of what one might input to post to discord?

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No clue, but you need to have some level of controlling spam. Someone will hook in and use it to flood you.

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@Rev0verDrive That would seem a bit weird to do in this scenario, but I suppose its possible. I don’t know if it would be possible to account for people taking the webhook though from the source code. But if it’s a discord server, I don’t see why that would end up being a serious issue at the same time though. That would at most just mean I need to sift through more messages to get to my default error messages that are running on the server.

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Every aspect of your game outside of dedicated server logic is exposed to clients. Thus vulnerable to malicious behavior.

You have to assume abuse and either block it or at least limit it.

Never trust a client.

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That cases are real thoughts and actually valid / good advice. Since without control of things/systems can get out of control, after all. It’s simply a professional approach however for some low risk scenarios and games can be done easy way. It’s good to inform community about the things can go wrong.

Proper way would be hashing where you send the message, type of message and handshake, allow list, word & character whitelist, spam timer, behaviour status etc. Since this is a player input, we don’t know what can be written so we have to take care of those. As some one that worked on AAA level chat/voicechat/multiplatform communications systems in hyper competetive games, I can easy tell that this is something that every dev should be carefull of.

So when it comes to your question. You want to shortcut this as short as possible. Not sure why message inside the game though if its not a chat. However:

1- You can simply launch url with a webform and handle messages on the web. You can pass client id etc or request some stuff. You can always change website easy way and its built for that.

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2- Eneable HTTP Blueprint plugin default

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You can setup discord bot I guess and webhook to send messages there or a webserver (can be on your local too ) where you handle the httprequests and dispatch them again (forward) if necessary

This method is also can be used to cron job check if an url has an update (from dev to user and dispatch those) However these are not for complex communication systems.
For sending simple message from player to devs. To discord webhook or an event in game triggering this and sending message to dev via this is fine.

Whatever your use case is, you can make a ui for it, message, coordinate whatever information you need, press send and it runs the plugin http request in behind. Not sure if its async or sync so use with caution and you can have some telemetry too about players if use cases involve tests too.

As delighter

How players clients can be crashed by chat

How to annoy other players via chat

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@RedGrimnir Thank you, and I am guessing your first few paragraphs are about letting players manually (type) send messages to discord, is that correct? If so, while you have given me information to think about if I go about that way, I am trying to only send preformatted errors to discord only at the moment so that I can find where exactly in the code it is messed up if a crash does not happen. So like i said, if for some reason an “is valid” node returns invalid when it needs to always return valid, I’d like to be notified about it in case I made a mistake upon shipping or upon testing a build before shipping. I can foresee other useful use cases for the preformatted messages as well than just that one example.

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@CVoiceOfficial You’re right what you build depends on the game, your test group size, and what you want to collect.

If you want to receive direct messages/telemetry from players, it’s totally doable, but you need to be careful with scale (volume can explode fast), and with quality/security (PII, spam, abuse, cost). Usually you start small and harden it over time with needs.

What you’re describing is essentially Game Telemetry Messages and yes, in bigger games this becomes a full system: gameplay events, errors/warnings, performance, networking, economy signals, etc. Its automated system, not a chat but from our perspective a message is message :slight_smile:

Simple approach (As Described)

  • Enable an HTTP solution (Blueprint HTTP / VaRest / custom HTTP wrapper).
  • Send telemetry via REST POST to any endpoint you control.
  • Make it accessible everywhere by wrapping it as a Blueprint Function Library (callable from both C++ and BP), so any dev can emit events where needed.

Over here I strongly recommend:

  • Making a basic BlueprintFunctionLibrary before everything. I don’t know you but if this is a 10+ team and things will be implmented, not to create additinal headaches for future make it from C++. You can wrap HTTPBlueprint function that sends automatically whatever message is.
    *Why Needed? : In future when your address changes, system changes you don’t go over each bp node and change them manually. There will be some spams so in future you can integrate Rate of sends not to DDOS yourself. In future there will be many errors so better C++ so you can integrate a send que even priority to it.

Deeper approach (More Professional & Bigger systems”)

  • Beyond manually sending events, you can also capture warnings/errors automatically from the executable/editor/build pipeline side.
  • This gives you unified visibility: gameplay events + crashes + warnings + performance signals.

Tooling options

  • There are small plugins on Fab, but for professional-grade telemetry you typically use:
    • Sentry (errors/crashes + dashboards + metrics)
    • Epic Online Services (if you’re already integrated there)
    • Or build a pipeline linking Unreal Insights → storage → web dashboards if you want full control.