Hello! I’ve been doing some research and having trouble coming across any decent solutions to my problem so I thought I’d take a shot asking it here.
I currently have the ability to generate a terrain chunk but I’m having some design problems when it comes to compatibility in multiplayer sessions.
TL;DR - Can you somehow replicate only collision from a mesh from server to client? Can you split a PMC into a pure collision component? Maybe a better way to simulation terrain collision on the server?
The original design was to generate chunks on a per client basis and alleviate some pressure on the server by simply telling clients the seed in which they must generate by. The problem with this method is that the server has no instance of collision and until this time I never really thought much of it. If the client generates terrain, the player will fall right through it unless the server can confirm something is there. My temporary solution to this was to make collision with the terrain local to the client (further relieving stress on the server). I had no luck with this and I’m not even sure if it’s entirely possible to force this in the client-server model.
This leads to my second design (the only one I could find online). When the client requests to generate a chunk, the server generates an identical chunk ensuring that the collision is there. Few problems occur with this, first off the processing time of generating all the procedural data is not cheap. Secondly, the server now holds onto something it doesn’t entirely need, even when the player is miles away.
So my question is, are there any other ways of going about this? I want to avoid putting too much pressure onto the server. I understand that the server needs to have some form of collision on it to function correctly with all the clients but is there some unreal functionality that I’m missing?
Any help on this topic would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!