Hey thanks for the updates and keeping this thread alive.
This is quite the extensive writeup, i really appreciate it.
I know i have tried most of what you have posted here with no luck. I was planning to put it on hold until im further along in the project and have my own steam appid.
A couple of things to note though:
When testing on 2 separate machines, i am intentionally not using LAN. My understanding is that with LAN checked, it wont register your session with steam, and when searching for sessions it doesnt make requests through steam. I am hoping that if players want to play through LAN, they can just do it through steam, as if its not over LAN.
I have tried the suggestion of turning prescence off, for some reason this actually caused my connecting client to crash.
This was interesting - “If you have a server and a client behind the same router, the client cannot connect to the server through the server browser. In fact the server may not be visible in the server browser of the client.
The client must connect to the server using the server’s internal IP address”
I would love to find this document. Surely this cant be right? How would one support playing with friends in the same house over steam and simultaneously with friends elsewhere? Like thousands of games manage to do? Regardless, i tried connecting via an external IP (using my phone as a tether) with no luck.
Regarding the steam sockets suggestion;
I tried upgrading to 5.4 since this was fixed, but i found the 5.4 editor to be wildly unstable compared to 5.3.2, so I went ahead and built the 5.3.2 engine from source and implemented the change made in 5.4 to fix this myself, but since im not using the steam sockets plugin it didnt help (as expected).
Ive been through the example project, but admittedly i just compared the code and settings to mine, i never tried the example to see if it works in my test environs. That would be a good thing to try.
Again, thanks for keeping this alive. Its extremely frustrating to me that join session returns through the success excecution pin before actually connecting to see it can.
Good luck finding a fix, i hope to hear from you if you do 