Hoping someone from Epic can chime in relatively quickly here.
We’re trying to decipher how IOnlinePartySystem is meant to facilitate a persistent party. We know it involves UParty, UPartyGameState, and UPartyMember state but all updating of that passes through IOnlinePartySystem.
Our first thought was the use of the Party beacon classes but that definitely looks like its meant to be used on as a game server to party leader communication channel. Is the intention to use a socket here? Perhaps UDP and connect clients directly to one another in a P2P network? Or connect them via a server that is written explicitly for parties? Or via REST API?
The entire thing is very open to interpretation, which isn’t a bad thing, but it’d be nice if there was some direction.
The intent of the IOnlinePartySystem interface is to expose the party/lobby functionality of each available online platform.
Currently the only party system implementation is via Epic online services and we have not released that code at this time. The code is not very useful unless you have the hosted services to connect to. Having said that, the party implementation is primarily dependent on using an XMPP for signaling the invite/join request/response processing, the data broadcast between party members, and the chat functionality. If you can stand-up your own XMPP server then we can provide the code for you to use.
Messing around with XMPP today. We setup an ejabberd server and we’re receiving ERROR_VERSION when trying to login anonymously, works using PSi. Is there a preferred server software that Epic would recommend?
If we haven’t heard from Epic by the time we’re done we’ll likely make ours available. I’ve solved all my XMPP issues, its a matter of implementing it into the interface now.
How are things coming along? We just started looking at this system. We were hoping to make something that works with Steam and their lobby system. Are you still working on it?
Hey Ryan, we’re also wading into online using Steam, with the end goal of being able to invite friends to a “party” and then queuing for a match together. In our case there can also be multiple local players per client, which seems like it might complicate things. Any wisdom you have would be appreciated though, the docs in this area seem pretty woeful
Not sure if you can get this working with Steam’s lobby system, we weren’t trying for that. We did end up getting an XMPP based service working and people were able to join parties as well as join servers together as a party. Unfortunately the project has since been abandoned but I’m more than willing to guide you in the right direction. Look me up on twitter @Overlawled.
