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

Understanding property replication

As stated before, property replication allows for the synchronization of objects in an Unreal multiplayer environment. It should be noted that, as the server is authoritative, updates will never be sent by the client. Obviously, the client may (politely) ask the server to change a property value, and the server will behave accordingly. Additionally, property replication acts as a reliable service: consequently, the Actor on the client will have the same value as the server sooner or later.

This means that if you’re trying to modify, from the client, a property that is replicated, any changes you make to that property will only be temporary. You should be already familiar with this topic as the character’s movement logic, at the moment, is a bit buggy – we are trying to make the character run from the client, but the server is blocking our commands as soon as the network is updated.

This is happening because, as soon as the...