What's the easiest way to connect online?

Development Platform & Builds
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Hi,
I am making an online game. So I want to test it with friends online. :slight_smile:
Now I’m looking for the simplest way to get clients connected.

The problem is port opening and forwarding. I don’t want to tell everybody how to configure his router and firewall because normally that’s painful and in the end still doesn’t work. :slight_smile:

So one solution would be putting up a master server, which implements NAT punch through or something like that. Has somebody already implemented something like that, which I could use then?

Would Steam solve my problem? Does Steam establish connections? And more important can I use that without going through GreenLight and so on?

Or does anybody have another solution?

I’ll already say thanks.
Thanks

2

I understand the hassle involved with setting up routers, but all that should be necessary is letting port 7777 though (or whatever port is set in your config file). See this question, for example.

UE4 does not not currently support NAT punch-through, and I’m not aware of any plugins for it, but there are third-party libraries that can be integrated. See the comments on the above-linked thread for some ideas.

Steam does establish connections and will perform NAT punching. I’m not too familiar with the Greenlight process, but you will need access to the Steam SDK to use the Steam online subsystem in UE4. For more information it’s probably best to contact Valve.

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Thanks a lot. The link sounds interesting. It has a third solution using UPnP or NAT-PMP. I’ll probably look into that.

But I still think it’s not as easy as forwarding UDP Port 7777. In practice there are still just a lot of other reasons why it probably won’t work.
One example I had at home is that my clients were connected wireless to the router. Like that it wasn’t possible to find a local server in the ShooterGame. I had to make cable connections to the router. Sounds strange I know but I wasn’t the only one with that problem.
To be clear thats a problem which already exists in windows networking.

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That’s a good point, though if UE4 can’t connect over wireless - and the router is configured correctly - I’d consider that a bug and UE4 should try to work around the Windows networking issues if possible.