Hey guys, first time i am posting here on the forums. I am wondering how one would make an in-game multiplayer server/lobby list that shows current online servers?
Is there any tutorial somewhere?
Ive been looking and googling around but im having issues finding anything about this subject.
Thanks in advance.
Yes I would like to know the same
yeah not a whole lot of information out there from what I can see. Very intrigued if anyone knows.
im no programmer but I think you’d have to have some kind of master matchmaking server to do this. Have a button for the clients that says “I wanna play”. That communicates to the server, telling the server the players IP and relevant game info. Then clients retrieve that information, and get a list of all games (you can make it hide the IP, of course). Then in the background tries to connect them.
I don’t see why you couldn’t do this fairly easily with blueprints, the only hard part is having a server and creating the communications system. I don’t actually know anything about how to get the server client to a server, or how dedicated servers really work at all. But maybe this info can help you get started?
Heck maybe I’ll work on making a nice “lobby/matchmaking” template just for kicks. I wouldn’t mind learning how to do this. The only thing I don’t know and worry about, is how much would a matchmaking server like this cost?
To elaborate on Pinworm because he’s on the right track.
Basically you need to setup a Heartbeat master server. This isn’t part of your dedicated server in which games are actually ran on it. Its just a static IP box that all servers report to that are online and hosting games and offers this information to end users requesting it. Depending on the # of servers and people hitting it I would imagine it wouldn’t need much CPU/RAM at all, or even bandwidth. However the more use it gets the more its gonna need resource and bandwidth wise.
But yes this is all going to have to be done in the code I do not believe there is any template for something like this yet. Not every game needs it really either, just depends on the type of game. A lot of games just do this in the backend unseen like matchmaking and pushes a group of players off to a server.
But yes if someone put this together in a tutorial I know I would look it over.