Book Image

Elevating Game Experiences with Unreal Engine 5 - Second Edition

By : Gonçalo Marques, Devin Sherry, David Pereira, Hammad Fozi
Book Image

Elevating Game Experiences with Unreal Engine 5 - Second Edition

By: Gonçalo Marques, Devin Sherry, David Pereira, Hammad Fozi

Overview of this book

Immerse yourself in the Unreal game projects with this book, written by four highly experienced industry professionals with many years of combined experience with Unreal Engine. Elevating Game Experiences with Unreal Engine 5 will walk you through the latest version of Unreal Engine by helping you get hands-on with the game creation projects. The book starts with an introduction to the Unreal Editor and key concepts such as actors, blueprints, animations, inheritance, and player input. You'll then move on to the first of three projects, building a dodgeball game, where you'll learn the concepts of line traces, collisions, projectiles, user interface, and sound effects. You’ll also discover how to combine these concepts to showcase your new skills. The second project, a side-scroller game, will help you implement concepts such as animation blending, enemy AI, spawning objects, and collectibles. And finally, you'll cover the key concepts in creating a multiplayer environment as you work on the third project, an FPS game. By the end of this Unreal Engine book, you'll have a broad understanding of how to use the tools that the game engine provides to start building your own games.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)

Understanding remote procedure calls

We covered variable replication in Chapter 16, Getting Started with Multiplayer Basics, and, while a very useful feature, it is a bit limited in terms of allowing custom code to be executed in remote game instances (client-to-server or server-to-client) for two main reasons:

  • The first reason is that variable replication is strictly a form of server-to-client communication, so there isn’t a way for a client to use variable replication to tell the server to execute some custom logic by changing the value of a variable.
  • The second reason is that variable replication, as the name suggests, is driven by the values of variables, so even if variable replication allowed client-to-server communication, it would require you to change the value of a variable on the client to trigger a RepNotify function on the server to run the custom logic, which is not very practical.

To solve this problem, Unreal Engine supports RPCs, which work...