Tech Talk - Multiplayer Server Hosting
While I’ve kept up posting on social media for #screenshotsaturday, I’ve been a bit behind on posting on the blog here. Though it might not appear that way, we’ve actually been pretty busy working on things behind the scenes. Things that don’t always lend themselves to photo-friendly blog posts like user interface design, game mechanics, testing and…
Multiplayer Server Hosting! Yeah! We started out looking at Microsoft Azure but ended up settling on AWS Gamelift for our dedicated server hosting solution. The Gamelift server-side integration was relatively easy to get going so we can now playtest our Alpha builds in the cloud. This is super-helpful getting feedback internally and will give us some time to get familiar with it before we do our Beta-testing.
It just works! Well, kinda…
The plugin listed on the Unreal marketplace above looks and sounds ready-to-go. I definitely felt a bit like the guy they showcased on the plugin page wearing the funny hat all sure of himself thinking he’s going to integrate and deploy his server in hours (days) about to be sucker-punched by the realities of misleading marketing ploys.
Okay, so integrating with Unreal wasn’t the easiest but it wasn’t exactly hard either. This blog was helpful, though how they managed to get a build with 0 Warnings is beyond me. There were a couple of hiccups with n00b stuff like maximum path length (I had to put the SDK at our root location to keep the PATH short or you end up with indecipherable errors) but overall things were easy. BTW - the support staff on the AWS gamedev forums respond with lighting-fast times (3 min!) during the week. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced customer service behind a set of SW libraries that expedient before. Big-ups to them!
The example integration of the server plugin with Unreal left a bit to be desired though. Obviously everyone’s implementation will be a bit different but an example would’ve been nice for the some of the things in this sequence diagram. Luckily I happened upon this guy’s implementation which provided a lot of helpful examples to start from. Player validation via PSID is key here, otherwise the server is just going to let any-old troll with an IP & PORT # connect by default.
Now as far as the client-side goes, if you decide to handle any of this within Unreal and not a 3rd party, your pretty much given the C++ SDK and left on your own. One initial approach might be to integrate and mimic a lot of the actions that you can already test via the AWS CLI. This is standard C++ stuff but if you want a starting point, start with this example Plugin for Unreal and add your aws-cpp-sdk-core / aws-cpp-sdk-gamelift built libraries and headers. That method seemed to be the easiest for integrating the C++ SDK and exposing the gamelift sessions framework to your UE4 CPP/Blueprints code. It also opens the door for using any of the other aws services if your going to roll-your-own identity or matchmaking services using aws.
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