I am looking to use unreal to create a 3d learning zone for my students, many of whom are soon to go off on study leave for examinations. We already have a school website, but I thought it would be a more pleasant environment if they could communicate with each other and have access to videos/ posters etc ingame. Is it possible to text chat with others in this game engine? I don’t suppose VOIP or similar is available is it? I’m just trying to find out which playform to use for my purposes. Others have suggested Second Life… but its not at all appropriate for the age level I teach. My oldest students are 16. SL contains a lot of content that would be very inappropriate.
Your help/guidance would be much appreciated.
Thank you,
Dermot
I had a similar idea a while ago leaning towards development with others. I can say that UE4 will easily handle what it is your trying to accomplish. VOIP is almost a standard feature if it isn’t already so I’m betting the functionality is here, you just need to look into how to tap into it. Look up VOIP and other network/internet functionality. As far as content goes, your get what you put in. If you don’t want kids to see something, don’t put it in! Not sure how the online chatting “censor” stuff works though. That might take some Blueprinting with a library look up table kind of thing.
Thank you for the reply. Much appreciated. I have put in a purchase order for the Unreal Engine with my school. I’m hoping it will fulfil my needs as you say. Happy to stick with text chat for now. Will the education licence allow me to install this on devices students bring into school or will I have to require my students to make an additional purchase? I understand that the edu licence allows for an unlimited site distribution. My school encourages and needs students to bring their own devices…
Unreal Engine 4 does have support for both voice and text chat. Text chat is more of a “feature on top of features” where it has been implemented by various games simply sending text across the network meant to be displayed. The chat log and such are all doable, I’d have to look into what documentation is available, but the code is there to do this.
VoIP has been implemented as well on PC, both in Steam and using Opus, an available, royalty-free voice codec (http://www.opus-codec.org/). There are some assumptions right now about how this code is setup/initialized for you, but given that our source is freely available, I would be happy to help you understand how you might modify it to work for your circumstances.