Book Image

Multiplayer Game Development with Unreal Engine 5

By : Marco Secchi
Book Image

Multiplayer Game Development with Unreal Engine 5

By: Marco Secchi

Overview of this book

If you’re fascinated by the immersive gaming experiences that enable multiple users to engage in collaborative or competitive gameplay, this Unreal Engine 5 game development book is for you. In this book, you’ll learn the foundational principles behind multiplayer games. Starting with a sample project, you’ll learn how to set up a networked system and make it work. Once the prototype of the project is functional, you’ll start adding game logic, including obstacles and AI opponents, to heighten the challenges and engagement, offering a captivating experience for players. Next, you’ll learn how to debug and optimize the project, before finally deploying the game build and integrating it with cloud services such as the Epic Online Services system. By the end of this book, you’ll have the confidence to develop and manage multiplayer experiences using the Unreal Engine environment, taking your newfound programming skills in your upcoming projects.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1:Introducing Multiplayer Games
5
Part 2:Networking and Multiplayer Games in Unreal Engine
10
Part 3:Improving Your Game
15
Part 4:Deploying Your Game Online

Improving performance and bandwidth utilization

Although Unreal Engine strives to maximize the efficiency of replicating Actors, it is typically a time-consuming process that can negatively impact performance. To facilitate this task, there are a few steps that you can take to optimize replication and make it more efficient. In this section, I will give you some advice on how to improve performance and avoid bottlenecks that may stop your game from working efficiently.

Turning on replication only when necessary

When replicating Actors, the server performs various checks, such as relevance, frequency of updates, and dormancy, among others. Avoid turning on replication on Actors that won’t need this feature to put them off these checks.

If you really need Actor replication, consider fine-tuning NetUpdateFrequency for less important (or less frequently changing) Actors. This property will set the maximum update frequency over the network for the Actor. As an example, a...