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Grosdoigt Dilane
Gameplay Programmer
About
This is our last project at ESMA, this is the most important project of our 3 years formation.
The goal of this project is to introduce us to the professional world by working within a small team and going through all the states of developpement of a video game by our own.
The game won the "coup de coeur" award which is the most liked game award.
Project infos
Role : Gameplay Programmer, Game designer, Online programmer
Team size : 9
From : September 2023
To : June 2024
Time frame : 10 months
Engine : Unreal Engine 5.3
Platform : Computer
Introduction
This project is a cooperative builder with 2 players, where you play with you friend to create your own Babylone. Each building as it's own informations that are written on a card that you have in your hand, those cards can be played on a grid that represent all the places where you can place it. Each building have a shape and a range that can make you gain some points if well-placed, with each placement, if done correctly, you can make your building evolve to gain even more points. The goal is to make the highest score possible and create your city.
My role during this project is to make the cooperative part working so you are able to play online and local on seperated computer. I'm also in charge of making most of the gameplay features like the placement, the cards, etc..., as well as doing some user experience when it comes to navigate through the menus.
What I learned
This project taught me a lot when it comes to collaborate with your team mates. It helped me see how it works in the professional world and that communication is one of the most important if not the most important skill that you need in your career. It also taught me "Replication" which is what I used for the cooperative features and it helped me improve my Workflow.
Dedicated Server
For the cooperative part, we thought of using the unreal session plugin but it was too limited for us because we want to be able to connect from everywhere, not just locally. The advantage of using a dedicated server is that with a public IP address you're able to connect from all around the world. For better security, we can add a password that the host can set to protect himself against people he don't want to connect. Even if it's not the best security, it's the best I can do with my actual skills.
With that dedicated server, we also need to put in common some gameplay features between all the players, so a player can not place a building on top of another for exemple. This is done with a server authority architecture, the use of this is to let the server check which move the players are able to do and which moves are forbidden. It's the server that does the logic so everything can be synchronized between the players.
Building not at the same place for both players
We had a problem where when we placed a building on the player 1's grid, the player 2 will receive it but not in the right place.
This was due to the fact that when the P1 clicked on a cell, it will send the cell to the server but the server will receive it's own cell. So the two cells weren't the same between the players and the server.
It's because we didn't send a pointer to that cell, we sended the object itself. Because our knowledge of C++ what laking, we find a work around. This work around was to send the Index X and Y to the server. It corrected the problem because integers are always pointers, which means that everyone will have the same indexes.
Desync between players
During the production, we got a problem where the 2 players would see different things, if one of the players has placed a building, the other one isn't able to see it.
I searched over some forums and websites why this problem is occuring, this is due to the net culling system of Unreal Engine. The net culling distance squared is like a zone around the actor, where only the players inside this zone will be able to see if a variable has changed value, if this is the case then the server will send the new value to all players inside this zone.
Because Unreal Engine is mainly built for projects like FPS or RPG, the fact that the players can see what's happening at the other side of the map is pretty useless, this is what the net culling distance squared is used for.
After knowing all of this, I was able to find the problem and fix it, this was simply fixed by checking a case that says "Always relevent" which means that, wherever we are on the game map, we will be able to receive the new variable value because the net culling distance is now infinite.
Before
After
Credits
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