I am hoping the bright minds of this forum will be able to help.
Me and a friend have ambition to build a game - more at the ‘hobby’ level and don’t necessarily have ambitions to release to a commercial market. For us, it’s just about learning the engine and realising a concept.
The concept is - I know, very tired - a pure survival game. In simple terms, we want to have a map and develop an ecosystem with which the players interact. We’re on a good track in terms of the fundamental, playable mechanics - health, hunger, thirst, fatigue, that kind of thing - but we would really like to introduce the multiplayer mechanic at this stage as it will make iterating and testing much more inclusive and engaging.
He and I live in different parts of Europe - so are not able to co-develop in person. The game itself is based on the third-person blueprint - although I do understand this and first-person are relatively arbitrary.
I’ve had a look (briefly) online and note that there are all manner of tutorials and bits of literature out there; most concerning operating dedicated servers.
Given we are developing at the hobbyist level, we don’t really have a budget and are not looking to stand up dedicated infrastructure. What we really want is to set something up where I can ‘host’ a session within UE4, I can play as a client and he can join that session as a (second) client. I’m interested to know if it’s possible to do this by exposing the game via the internet, or alternatively if we use a VPN to link our sessions logically into a LAN.
Either way, we just want to be able to easily join the game at the same time and coexist in the same map as two equivalent players. What’s the best/simplest workflow? What is it that I am ‘looking’ for? Any links to documentation, explanation of terminology or actual tutorial series’ would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance. Apologies if this is the wrong sub-forum - I wasn’t sure where this would fit.
Not sure if thread ‘bumping’ is allowed…but I was just checking back in and I am still at a loss, unfortunately.
Appreciate I’m not a regular poster - but if there is anyone out there that can help with pointing me in the right direction, I’d be eternally grateful!
In simple terms, as a minimum the game has to be ‘built’ and run as a standalone, right? There’s no way to launch the game from within the editor itself and then have someone connect to that?
Just trying to understand the minimum requirements on this front, too - as having to share the game with every iteration seems quite heavy going. Or perhaps it isn’t and all the changes ‘server-side’ don’t need to be shared - so the remote player is just launching the same client and getting the updated info about the game once they establish that connection.
Apologies - this is one of those topics where I should probably have a more fundamental understanding before we reach that iterative-testing phase; but by the same token, we’d like to collaborate, test, iterate, test, etc from an early stage to get the right ‘feel’ for things.