It seems simple enough. All I want to do is store a player name in my player controller or player state. But those are reset when joining a server (which changes the level). So I store the player name in my game instance, which should be persistent and local to the client. Here are the steps:
Menu widget has a, editable text box:
- On change, update the MPGameInstance → PlayerName string variable.
MPPlayer controller Event BeginPlay:
- grab the PlayerName variable from my game instance
- grab my player controller (self, since I am running the player controller “BeginPlay”)
- call a “Run on Server” RPC SetPlayerSettings and pass the name and the player controller in as parameters.
MPPlayerController “SetPlayerSettings” custom event (RunOnServer, reliable):
- this just gets the MPGameState and calls the “ServerSetPlayerStateInfo” RPC below, passing along the above parameters.
MPGameState “ServerSetPlayerStateInfo” custom event (Multicast, reliable):
- Pulls the player state from the passed-in player controller
- casts to MPPlayerState
- sets MPPlayerState->DisplayName string variable to the passed-in string.
Now, the player state SHOULD have whatever name is stored in that client’s local game instance. BUT:
MPGameMode Event OnPostLogin:
- I grab the “New Player” output and pull out the Player State target
- Cast the player state to MPPlayerState
- Send a notification that MPPlayerState->DisplayName has joined the session.
BUT the notification always shows the name of the server player.
I have tried many different methods of this:
- Setting the player name as a player controller string variable: Gets reset to default on joining / level load.
- Setting the string variable in game instance, and setting player controller name variable on BeginPlay: Shows server player name.
I’ve tried several other ways that I forget by now, but the results are the same: The player name of the client either gets reset to default or set to the value stored in the server’s game instance.
I understand that the player controller exists on both the server and the owning client. But it seems that the BeginPlay event only cares about the server when you’re joining a session or changing levels in a joined session.
Can anyone correct me or set me in the right direction? My end goal is just to store a widget-set player name as a string variable somewhere it won’t get reset on join / level change, and have my player controller re-inherit that name when joining a session or changing levels.
I wish there was more / better documentation on order of execution of all the beginplay / onlogin stuff, and although plenty of resources tell me that the player controller exists on the client and server, I’ve yet to find a more detailed explanation of how they interact when you’re a client, since you have technically a local and remote copy of your controller.
