UE4 + Steam Host Migration

Hey folks,

we’re looking for ideas / advice / solutions for some kind of a host migration with Steam in Unreal Engine 4.

Our Multiplayer implementation is already working quite nicely, including setting up a lobby and inviting friends etc., but now we’ve stumbled over the issue of the host quitting the game, thus ending it for every other client inside that session.

We’ve thought about using our own little API, which mostly serves for player data, highscores and assets, to manage a pseudo-lobby. Say the host starts a game from a lobby, then we’ll post the players SteamIDs to our API so we know who’s playing with whom.

If the clients within that session recognize the sudden lack of the host, they could poll our API with that matter and it would determine a new host, which could initiate a new session with some preset parameters (like time left, player stats, etc, so pretty much the same game could get rebuild in the background).

Now here comes the issue: we don’t know how to get the clients to join the new session on the newly delegated host. They have no knowledge about the session stucture on the new host and the host can’t remotely pull them in, it seems.

If you guys have any (other) idea or solution for this (except dedicated servers, we’re not ready for these yet, need the player-hosted way for now) we’d greatly appreciated your help.

Thanks in advance!

I’d be interested in this too

I made a plugin for this