I started experimenting with multiplayer for my project just yesterday and it’s impressive how many things work “out of the box”. What I am trying to do now should be pretty simple too, but I’m not sure how to do it.
I just want clients to constantly send a direction-vector to the server that represents the mouse-cursor-direction in world-space. I think there is no way the server can do this by itself, because (afaik) it can’t know the position of a client’s cursor, and even if it did, it would also need to know the client’s viewport settings to make any use of it. So I want the client to have “authority” over this vector and it should be treated like any other “input” from the player controller.
The only way I can think of atm would be to write a server-function and call it from the client with the direction-value, only to set the property on the server. I would have to call that function every frame though and I suspect there is a better way to simply replicate a value from client to server. Any help?
Thanks a lot for answering! (Most of my questions never get answered…)
At the moment, I just need the value for rotating the player characters to their clients’ mouse cursor in a kind of top-down setting. But since this is also relevant for, let’s say, firing a gun in the right direction, I guess it’s not just cosmetic.
Anyway, it’s good to know I’m on the right track, so I don’t have to rewrite everything later.
Would you say it’s a good idea to store this value along with any values that I might add later inside a structure and send everything at once (only if needed, of course) by a single RPC call to reduce overhead? I don’t know what an UE4 package looks like, but I guess the less packages, the better the efficiency.
I have another question: Is it possible to call a function both on the client and server? The idea is to do this with a “startCrouch” function. Since the player actor is being replicated, it should be enough to call it on the server, I guess. But calling it on the client too would probably prevent a delay. At least that’s what I’m thinking.
