[Plugin] Socket.io Client

[getnamo]

@bot2600;562351

First, awesome work! And they are really clean to use from Blueprints. I do have one quick question though. I have a node server that I have been using as the backend for Unity and am looking to test it out against UE4, which there wasn’t a client for socket.io when I first looked, so this is awesome!

The issue I am running into is if I pass a JSON object instead of a string, I dont seem to get anything back from the plugin. Are there plans to support more advanced objects?

Thanks!

Edit: Adding screenshot, unless I call JSON.stringify on my objects this always goes to empty string

…

Excellent idea on adding JSON parsing. When I bound the function, due to time constraints and simplicity I do a data->get_string() then convert to UE FString to get a message, seen here: https://github.com//socketio-client-ue4/blob/master/Source/SocketIOClient/Private/SocketIOClientComponent.cpp#L41

The base library that I integrated uses sio::message as wrapper for JSON objects. This needs to take the received message object and turn it into a JSON string so you can parse it using the blueprint utility you’re using. Off the top of my head I thought get_string() would do that, but apparently it strictly checks for ‘string’ type variables. Looking in the socket.io-client-cpp library source would be the best place to spot how.

Edit: seems the library doesn’t natively support message<->JSON conversion, but a workaround can be found here: Feature Request : Expose sio::message mapping to/from std::string · Issue #87 · socketio/socket.io-client-cpp · GitHub. To add the workaround to the plugin would require adding that function to the component implementation and just call it if we get an empty string from our regular method.

@bot2600;562389

Ok, one last issue I found, I might go look at the source and see if the 3rd party library is exposing it and it just needs to be wrapped or if it isn’t there.

It looks like the client hears socket.emit but doesnt hear io.emit. Let me see if I can explain that better. On the javascript side there are events that are inside of your existing connection, and those are what I am considering socket.emit, then there are those that are server level that run in the game loop. They fire irregardless of your connection being present or not, though of course I suppress them when noone is connected

Anyhow, awesome start! If I get time I will poke around at it and do a PR if it is something easy to fix but my C++ is limited at best

Edit: Sorry, just re-read the first message and noticed you stated this was very basic. Sorry for being silly

Have you tried io.sockets.emit()? This should work IMO, but it may be down to listening to the broadcast correctly.

I’ve added the two issues here: https://github.com//socketio-client-ue4/issues and this is the link to the underlying library: GitHub - socketio/socket.io-client-cpp: C++11 implementation of Socket.IO client let me know what you discover!