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

Joining a session

In this section, we will work on a couple of widgets that will display a list of sessions available in the network and let the players join them. We will need two widgets: Session Item Renderer and Find Session. The first one will be used to display a single session’s information, while the second one will be responsible for using the first one as a list of available sessions.

Creating the SessionItemRenderer widget

The widget you will create will have the following features:

  • Displays the available server name
  • Displays the maximum number of available connections, along with the number of connected players
  • Provides a join button to let the player enter the session

The first thing we must do is create the widget. So, in the Content Browser area, follow these steps:

  1. Right-click and select User Interface | Widget Blueprint. In the pop-up window that appears, select User Widget.
  2. Name the newly created widget WB_SessionItemRenderer...