Should I use a pawn or a character for multiplayer top down space shooter?

Development Programming & Scripting AI
1

Forgive the noob question. The reason I ask is this:

  • Started with a pawn (both player and enemy ships). Got movement working, firing projectiles, etc.

  • Started adding AI. Found the AI Behavior tool kit. Bought it. *Only works on characters*(point one)

  • I dont have a "human-like" character so wasnt sure to if I should scrap the current work and move to something that would be easier to integrate with behavior trees and the toolkit.

  • I also read that for a multiplayer games, characters are your friend. They already have alot of code built in to them to help with games over the internet.(point two)

I guess my questions are this:

  • Should I move my player/enemies ships to Characters even though they arn't human-like?

  • Would this be easier to integrate with Blackboard and behavior trees?

  • Would Character based starships(not pawn) be better for a multiplayer top down spaceship shooter(think SPAZ)?

  • Here is an example of what I got working so far with Pawn

Thanks for any input you might have!

2

Your video link doesn’t work. It’s linking to your My Videos page.

3

Shoot sorry about that!

4

Well at first glance the pawn and character pawn are the same except that the character pawn includes a character movement component that a simple pawn does not.

The movement component is very important if you plan on network play as it is the state of the movement component that manages the replication requirements, error correction, and you can plug a function directly from your input table so if you have W set up to move forward the forward velocity is replicated to the connected clients and not the event of pushing W as an action. The movement component also does a lot of other client to client requirements but if you need multiplayer abilities then the movement component of the character pawn does all of the replication requirements for you with out having to duplicate the same requirements using a pawn that does not have a movement component.

Easy to test by setting up for local two player server and if your object aka player does not move then the required replication is not being sent.

Why not use a character pawn.

If you object does not have replication requires then a movement component is not required and one last thing that needs to be calculated.

P.S. this is what I have figure out so far

5

Thank you my good sir! That decided it for me. I will rebuild my player/NPCs. Thank you for you time and help:)