First I’d just like to say that I’m extremely interested in UE4, and it seems like a fantastic deal to me. However, I am primarily interested in building multiplayer games, which UE4 currently doesn’t seem to have much obvious support for. I assume that there will be something in the source for networking because it was available in UE3, but I haven’t purchased a subscription because there is absolutely nothing in the wiki about this topic. I really don’t want to get into a sparsely documented networking API if at all possible.
Is Epic expecting us to roll with a third party library like RakNet? If not, how accessible is the networking API? And can we expect better documentation in the future or is there any currently that I have missed?
UE4 support Networking out of the box. If you setup your character (pawns) correctly, and turn on the replication stuff on Default Settings of the Character BluePrint. You are good to go.
Just start with -listen flag or open console and type: “open localhost”.
Then, on another client, just “open <machine_ip>”.
Voila, you are connected and two players on screen.
UE4 definitely has networking support built in, just like UE3 did. The system has been improved in areas as well. I apologize for the lack of documentation surrounding networking and multiplayer. It’s high on our priority list. We’ve had several internal threads about it in the last week. I’ll try to post back here as soon as we have something available to take a look at.
If you have specific questions or concerns, I would urge you to ask them here or on the AnswerHub site.
Excellent! Thank you for the fast reply, you have earned yourself another customer.
I’ll dig in once the download finishes, but I’m looking forward to the future documentation you’re hinting at. By the way, It’s great to get helpful replies from the developers and you guys seem to be doing an excellent job so far.
You’re welcome! We’re all having a blast seeing the community grow and interacting with you. Can’t wait to see what you create with the engine and tools.
If you are already in the game, use the console and type open <mapname>?listen
and you will see in the logs that it is setting up for a multiplayer game.
Clients then can type
**UE4Editor.exe <gamename> <ipaddress> -game **
or open <ipaddress> from the console
While we get our documentation in order, please check out http://wiki.beyondunreal.com, which has a great wealth of UE3 information that is still very relevant when it comes to networking. Learning about replication and remote procedure calls (RPCs) will be critical to getting your data back and forth between clients and servers. The syntax may be different, but the concepts are the same.
Due to this question coming up a few times now, I went ahead and created a basic page on this, based on snippets from the forum and prior experience.
Feel free to fix/edit as required: Wiki: Networking/Replication
