Turning a Singleplayer Game into a Multiplayer one with Dedicated Servers.

Hello, right now im developing a singleplayer game in UE 5.1, the whole project has been developed in blueprints and from the epic games launcher version of UE (not the github one). I was tasked with preparing the game to have multiplayer functionality using dedicated servers (in theory it would be Microsoft Azure servers), after exhaustivly reading all the unreal documentation about networking and multiplayer Im not even sure if it is possible to turn the game into a multiplayer one (this game has been in development for several months and its quite complex in terms of blueprints programming), so ultimately my question is, is this even possible to do? would I have to redo all the game from scratch using the github version of unreal and using c++ classes? If anybody has had to deal with this kind of situation before, what would be the first step to take to turn this game into a multiplayer one? Any help would be apreciated.

Most likely it will turn into a horrible mess attempting to convert a single player game into multiplayer. The good news is that you don’t need to do anything in C++ but you do need the source code to package a Dedicated Server.

I recommend you scrap all the singleplayer gameplay logic and redo it with multiplayer in mind.

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Thanks for your reply!

It´s exactly what I was fearing, because it is a big project starting it again in the source version will be very tedious and difficult.

Also you said it wouldn´t be neccesary to use c++ but literally there are no tutorials of people setting up dedicated servers using only blueprints, as far as I know unreal only has 4 blueprints for multiplayer (create, search, join and destroy session) and are solely for LAN multiplayer not for dedicated servers, please correct me if im mistaken, and if you know of any tutorials or info I can use to learn about dedicated servers from the client side it would be greatly appreaciated.

Sorry you are right. You might need to Host a Session from C++ unless if you are using an existing framework like the “Lyra Starter Game”.

Since you mention Azure I recommend you look at PlayFab and their Unreal Engine Plugin.
PlayFab should be able to handle the backend of starting new server instances as well as advertising them so they are searchable by the Plugin API calls etc.

You don’t have to choose PlayFab obviously since there is a lot of game service providers out there but without one it quickly becomes a real challenge to build all the backend services for Dedicated Servers yourself unless if you know what you are doing.

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Thanks for all the help provided! it has been very informative, I will search for the playfab plugin and see where that gets me.

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