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

Introducing the Unreal Engine multiplayer system

As we already saw in the previous sections, in a networked system, it is essential to consider what data is sent and how it is sent, as this can drastically influence the performance and overall experience of the game.

Unreal Engine features a powerful networking framework, which is used in some of the most popular online games in the world. This section provides an overview of the concepts that power the Unreal Engine multiplayer framework, as well as their usage in multiplayer gameplay.

Network modes and server types

In Unreal Engine, a computer’s relationship to a multiplayer session is referred to as a network mode. An Unreal game can be set as one of the following network modes:

  • Client: In this mode, the computer will act as a client, connecting to a server in a network multiplayer session.
  • Standalone: This mode is strictly used for non-networked games (single players or local multiplayer) and will not...