Party Beacon, Lobby Beacons, Oh My

Development Programming & Scripting C++
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So I have spent the better part of a week now attempting to dissect the best way to make a rocket league/borderlands party system and came across lobby beacons first and then party beacons. As far as I can tell by searching there is no public information on lobby beacons however a fairly good write-up on beacons themselves here. Party beacons have a little more explanation with a forum post in another thread along with an answer hub explanation in the thread as well, however there are no examples in either one. I have spent a little while attempting to decipher both along with the code from UT which confusingly calls something that inherits from ALobbyBeaconHost a UTPartyBeaconHost however have not gotten much farther.

Based on what Moss said in the party beacon thread they are meant to be used between client? The function calls seem to indicate that its meant between a party and a server however and the command used to join a PartyBeaconHost from a PartyBeaconClient is RequestReservation which takes information that a client probably would not have yet such as a list of clients. If you attempt to call InitConnect from a LobbyBeaconClient I


Malformed_Packet: UNetConnection::ReceivedPacket: Received control channel close before open

however the same on a PartyBeaconClient just returns no reservation. Is there anywhere a flow diagram can show how either is to be used or the general idea of how to use them for a lobby/party type system?

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I would definitely love more information on this as well. I had tried to look into implementing a similar system in the game that I am working on, but there was no documentation on beacons at all.

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If you want to work with just beacons and write your own logic then https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/467973/what-are-online-beacons-and-how-do-they-work.html is a very good writeup, just realize that if your using the steam subsystem the current AOnlineBeaconHost does not allow you to use anything except steam sockets currently. However that is the only documentation I have really found on them.

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If anyone in is still struggling with implementing beacons, I have released a new plugin for UE4.27, 5.0, 5.1 where I have fully implemented lobby beacons with a bunch of advanced features for party management. Check it out here: Advanced Lobby System in Code Plugins - UE Marketplace

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For anyone coming here from Google (and doesn’t want to pay $60 just to figure out how something works): This post I found gives a great overview of the system.

I wish I found that post when I was trying to figure all this out a couple days ago. The comments are helpful as well (pointing out a way to avoid making a subclass you don’t need).