I was specifically talking about Create / Search / Join / Quit Session and the widget that handles the “lobby” where you get to see which players are there and the game mode / settings. It was something several people asked here and on my private list and I was wondering whether or not to include it. But I’ll stick with my original plan and see how it piles up for now I believe.
But I keep that idea in my pocket and I’m eager to hear any feedback anyone would have.
improving the user interface (that’s what I’m most scared of)
producing the learning content / documentation
That’s still a long road but at least I got the ball rolling.
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I’m still eager to hear what you guys think!
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Have a great day ladies and gentlemen, and have fun in your projects
This looks great! I’d love to see the lobby/server settings added but something more unique like a player hub built-in would be incredible. I know that’s probably a bit of a stretch…Do you have any plans for future releases? Or will it mostly be bug fixes and integration tutorials?
A ‘player-hub’ - you mean like moving around with your character in the lobby with other players’ characters?
I’m not quite sure about updates as of yet, I mostly think in terms of learning resources.
I have lots of plans regarding them and I wouldn’t want to sabotage them by giving premade stuff (obviously following a tutorial and doing the stuff has more educational value than just downloading it).
I have a different set of tutorials I’d like to make to go along MCE: Basics / Advanced / Going Further. Basic would be quickest possible implementation, Advanced would be the breakdown of a system and how to use it and Going further would be directly modifying MCE’s code. But it’s a bit too early to talk about this as I haven’t decided the final educational format yet.
I’ve been working on updating every variable, functions and parameters names for the past two weeks (I’ve been pretty busy with other tasks and it is also a tedious work so I’m slower).
I also did other cleaning stuff. It’s almost done now.
Next step is to evaluate the usability of the Plugin and write up all the comments to make the code welcoming.
I can clearly see the end of the road but it’s not quite here.
I’ll keep updating this post even without anything to show, I let it down too much.
I’ve been struggling hard these past weeks with several things:
4.16 compatibility
packaged version behavior discrepencies
IRL work
Blueprint instability overall when changing asset names and folders
But I’ve managed to do several things:
added a Multiplayer Menu with simple Host / Join feature
cleaned up all the hierarchy, asset names, updated stuff to Unreal standards, renamed things
tested MCE a bit as a user, it helped me shape the end-user workflow
this made me rework several big systems and that’s why I ended up fighting against some Blueprint instability
I added Categories to my Blueprint nodes to help the user find the nodes MCE gives him: System: Everything MCE does internally, you might not want to call or edit this. Feature: Everything MCE allows you to do, you might want to browse them. Setup: Nodes MCE needs to be properly setup, expose lots of tweakable variables. HUD: Nodes MCE offers to display on screen informations. Override: Functions you can override to customize MCE without editing System functions
Next steps:
finalize some reworked systems
rebuild the examples that were associated with them
add few missing juicy features
And these will get me to the last big task: add shortcuts / tooltips and comments to Blueprint code.
I know it’s getting far longer than expected but I’m happy with how it goes. I’m taking my time to produce something I really think people can iterate on and learn from.
I wish everyone plenty of power for the week to start.
I now need to write the comments / tooltips to increase** the friendliness and teaching potential of the Multiplayer Combat Editor.**
It will be a long task but I hope I’ll find the strength to get it through quickly.
I’d be glad to here some feedacks on what you’d like to see / learn from the code comments and the common mistakes you see in comments in general (things that don’t help).
Have a good night ladies and gentlemen.
I wish you good luck and have fun in your projects.
There are 2 main categories of content in the plugin: the Core content and the Example content. I finished commenting the first part, the second will wait for now.
Commenting the Example content will take me about 15 hours and will basically unlock the full potential of MCE (that’s where people will learn how to use it). But I don’t need to comment them to submit the plugin. And since the submission process will be long, I’ll plan on commenting this part of the content at that moment.
Here are few of the blueprint nodes the user can call in “BP_Skill” which is the actor component representing an ability in the game. There are many more features included…
Imagine a series of event like, press -> FX + animation | Anim notify -> find actors in sphere -> deal damage and stun + FX.
And I realized I had several systems in place that allow me to quickly create a new feature: Team Modifier. You can now modify the team of an actor that has a Combat Manager on-the-fly with Modifiers.
I tried it with the Bolt skill which can be considered like a Charm here. I’m bending Zombies to my will!
I decided to polish MCE a bit more before trying to submit it and add two new features : spawn AI with Skill (Summons & Minions) and Limited Target Amount (piercing projectiles and limited target area of effects).
I realized not having these features was lackluster when I was trying to brainstorm Moba characters using MCE tools. This was definitely something I needed to fix.
I also plan to try things out in 4.16 and 4.17 to do a triple version release (from 4.15 to 4.17). I hope everything is going to work smoothly on this side (4.16 looked fine with MCE last time I checked). I’m not sure if I can only submit the 4.15 version alone.
I have made a “Let’s Create” video inspired by GaimeDev.
I recreated Ezreal with the Multiplayer Combat Editor tools (minus the basic attacks and the passive).
Here is the video showcasing the whole process (50 minutes) but timestamps are in the description if you’d like to just check the end results
My experience highlighted few things I needed to improve regarding the skill creation workflow.
It also made me realize I did not think about Passive skills at all (it did not cross my mind whereas I’m a moba enthusiast, I feel bad :p).
I’ll surely not add them now without prepairing their addition properly therefore I’m likely to add them after the release.
I’m going to fix the few thing I noticed and I guess I’ll be packaging an example project for you guys.
In the meantime, have fun in your projects everyone
EDIT: Everything seems to be working fine in 4.16 without any efforts. It’s looking promising
My god this looks incredible. I’d love to see more videos like the Ezreal one. Especially if it’s less work for you instead of editing or commentating. I really wish I could buy this right now. I’ll be buying it day one for sure.
You do some incredible work. Thank you for your generous contributions!
Thank you for your support guys, I really appreciate it
Dedicated Server:
It would need some rework regarding the code, not much of a big deal in itself. But if I’d like to keep the Listen-Server feature, I’d have to maintain and update two systems at once. And I can’t do that. It means I have to choose one setup. I chose “Listen Server” because I guessed most of the user base would build a game using Listen Server (since Dedicated needs more $$$ if you want to ship the game). I also believe most people who’re playing around Multiplayer are doing so using Listen-Server setup (it is more convenient).
But I’m not sure of this, it was kind of a guess. Please let me know what you think.
Movement Prediction
This is a tough one. I’m already struggling to get the dash / movement skills to be smooth on Client Machines. The way to smooth it really depends on your game / setup and I’m having quite a hard time. I’ll keep you in touch about the multiplayer prediction overall but note that it is quite a complicated subject which I’m not comfortable with. Especially since it basically yells “tweak the character movement c++ class” all over the internet and I certainly won’t do that because it goes against the “plug and play” philosophy of MCE. Movement Prediction is all about this as well and it might be wrapped up with the rest of my solution, and it might not.
There will be video tutorials about how to use the plugin. Most of them will be about discovering MCE’s feature by creating game content. And of course I plan to talk, go slow and explain everything. This one was just the first test I made to make sure the plugin was friendly to use.
And yeah they definitely take less time than commenting the whole thing (and I enjoy a lot more as you can guess :D).
I improved the “Make Transform” and “Rotation” process as it was too much overhead. I wrapped the whole thing into two functions that does it all for us
Regarding the Multiplayer Combat Editor:
I won’t be working much on it this week, lots of things are happening IRL
In the meantime, a 2D Artist will be doing some stuff to promote MCE (neat )
I’m reworking the dash to be cool and I wait to get every pieces needed to submit.
I won’t rush anything regarding submission. It was 6 months of hard work for me regarding the plugin and work in general, 6 months of rushing forward.
I’m going to clearly analyze, review and process now. Then I’ll make the move. Hopefully within the month or the next one.
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