persistent actor in game world

[jr557]

@Fluppi393

If I understand you correctly you have dedicated servers for your game that players can connect to, store inventory in some container and later be able to find it again after reconnecting?

Yes, that’s what I was thinking. But also other players might also interact with the container when they are offline.

@Fluppi393

If it is just that it should be pretty simple, just store the inventory as replicated variables on an actor in memory on the server and the client can access them. If you need persistence over server restarts or crashes then you can implement a save system on the server.

I would like this type of persistence so the player doesn’t lose all of their progress if there is a server crash or restart needed. Dune suggested the Unreal Load/Save system which creates a binary .sav file on the server but I’m not sure if this would be a scalable solution. There could be a lot of containers on the server and may involve a lot of reading/writing to the hard drive.

I would like players to have the option to host their own dedicated server (if they have the required setup and connection). It seems unreasonable to have them configure a database manually in order to get the dedicated server up and going, doesn’t it? So if I wanted to use a database, I guess there would have to be some kind of middleman which handles setting up and configuring the database. Maybe that’s where a service like PlayFab (or other third party service) would come in?

Any ideas on how to implement this type of save system so server crashes won’t destroy player progress?

@Fluppi393

If you need persistence over multiple servers etc. you would need a cloud service.

Don’t need this type of persistence between servers. Servers should be completely independent of one another. If player joins a new server he essentially has to start over on that server.