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

Executing functions over the network

In this section, you will learn how to properly call functions over the network and what the word “authority” really means for the UE multiplayer system. In particular, you will get some insight into which entity should execute a function when it has been called: a client or the server.

Spawning Actors

It is time to start adding pickups at runtime. You are going to achieve this by adding a spawn area Blueprint to the level.

This Blueprint should be able to do the following:

  • Choose a random position every time it spawns something
  • Spawn random pickups at predefined intervals
  • And obviously... behave correctly over the network!

Let’s get started.

Choosing a random spawn position

Let’s start by creating the Blueprint and setting its parameters:

  1. Create a new Actor Blueprint and call it BP_Spawner.
  2. Add a Box Collision component, name it SpawnArea, and make it the Scene Root...