I’ve been making a multiplayer fps game, and I’ve just gotten to the multiplayer part. I’m quite new, and not good at coding. Most of the rest made sense, but trying to learn this is like trying to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem. There’s no documentation on “options” in the “open level” node. “Switch Has Authority” is poorly explained, and not in layman’s terms.
If I have health setup as a float variable, how do I grab my characters, and another affected players character’s health? (I can figure this out, but I have to literally learn how to every time, because it’s not explained right)
Why does every tutorial require C++, or even requiring you to download a modified “source” version of unreal?
I moved from unity because I couldn’t wrap my head around C++, and nodes seemed easier (and apart from server work, and making animation setups work, it is easier). I’m about to quit this project after not being able to figure this out after a few months of no luck.
Now I understand that unreal engine isn’t really supported for external devs like me, but this is just a plea.
Multiplayer isn’t simple, if you’re starting out, doing a multiplayer game is really difficult to figure out, and trying to do it without C++ is even harder.
yeah, but there’s really only a few different “main” ways to have a game setup, so making a “simple setup” of some kind shouldn’t be impossible. And with Epic’s experience, shouldn’t be that hard either, they’ve probably done it a thousand times.
If you aren’t familiar with the engine, jumping straight into a multiplayer game is probably the worst thing you can do. Grabbing a variable from an object should not be a concept you need to relearn when you’re at the stage of making multiplayer games, if it is you are jumping way too far ahead.
I would strongly suggest spending more time with the engine first. Multiplayer is not easy, it changes the way you have to program and there is definitely not a one-size-fits-all solution for multiplayer programming. Make some single player games before even thinking about multiplayer. I’ve been doing MP everyday for the last several years and I still trip myself up.
Most multiplayer tutorials require C++ because in all honesty if you’re serious about making a multiplayer game, you will be using C++. Blueprints are fine up until a point and shipping simple multiplayer games with it can be done, but C++ gives you a heck of a lot more, and I highly doubt any multiplayer blueprint project shipped without touching C++ at least once.
If you’re still not disuaded, Epic have several multiplayer content examples on the Epic Launcher which you can study. Tutorials are only good for showing you where stuff is IMO, they don’t really teach you anything directly. Content is far more useful than tutorials.
To prove my point, only one of the several multiplayer content examples is pure Blueprint, the rest are C++.
So TheJamsh, you’re suggesting that they have a bad system for multiplayer? After 1000 days of doing it, it shouldn’t be tripping you up. I’ve done 3 single player games, but having to learn more complex ai, and their related animations, started to daunt me, so I redirected to multiplayer.
I honestly, truly believe that they don’t care about people using their engine. They may be interested in the income, but they don’t try too hard for that here. They can’t even make their tutorials work half the time, and are poorly explained.
You not understanding it, and me occasionally forgetting something, doesn’t make it a “bad system”. Multiplayer is not easy, regardless of engine - it will take a long time to get familiar with it.
Unreal Engines’ heritage is built on multiplayer, and given there are thousands of UE4-powered multiplayer games out there that work just fine I’d say the problem lies in your hands. Study the content examples in the launcher. They are all up-to-date in terms of working in the latest versions of the engine, and source code is more useful than any documentation or tutorial.
You can get away with a lot of shortcuts in singleplayer, but IMO, multiplayer has essential skill requirements like good approaches to system design and general architecture. Don’t expect it to be any easier than AI.
Epic’s multiplayer system for the most part is pretty reasonable - it abstracts quite a lot of the *true horror *of writing multiplayer code away and wraps it all within a few different concepts as part of it’s ‘Replication’ model.
Fact of the matter is that multiplayer is just plain more difficult that singleplayer and it’ll take time to wrap your head around most of the concepts. Best place to start is to start small, and the best way to learn is simply by doing. There are no shortcuts.