Greetings everyone! Kevin here back from the holidays, I hope you all had a great new year.

So I’ve been back at my station for a little less than a week and have made some changes to the lobby. The lobby have now been changed from a 2D-widget to a 3D-lobby!

This way I don’t have to worry too much about replicating variables like the timer and a level’s votes, as they both will be held by the same object without the need of network references. Players now vote on levels by jumping down a hole, which triggers the player to vote on the level that the hole is tied to.

So when I created the 3D-lobby I apparently fixed a problem where servers that are currently playing cannot be found in the server browser but joined through IP. This may be related to the problem where a player who leaves a session can’t find the server in the browser but can still join through IP, but that isn’t confirmed yet.

I’ve been thinking for a while on how I should transmit the name of the server to the server browser. Unreal Engine supports reading a server’s name, but for some reason not to set it. The name it get is either your account name (Steam, Xbox live, etc) or your computer’s name, depending if the Online Subsystem is set to NULL or not.

So after reading through the same answer to many people with similar problems, I’ve decided to try out the Advanced Sessions plugin.

That’s a lot more options to choose from (well all I really wanted was to set a single variable but whatever). Thanks to this plugin I will be able to give more options to the server browser.

The current lobby is unique. It’s not something you usually see in a third-person-shooter game and can give players a different point of view about the game, for good or worse. It would be wise to have players test with and without 3D-lobbies to understand what is more interesting and enjoyable.

I’ve solved every problem with the help of blueprints so far and they’ve been very helpful. However they still limit you to what Epic Games haven’t implemented yet. In those cases I either have to be creative in blueprints, download a plugin, or make it possible myself through C++. I think that I should start to get more familiar with using both Blueprints and C++ for better results in the future.

Sadly I can’t give more information on what I’ve done as this is all I’ve done since coming back from the holidays. So instead I will tell you about what I will be doing after this post.

• There still are one or more memory leaks in the code (most likely caused by me) that needs to be fixed.

• Players currently use the name of their client, they should be able to pick their own name.

• If the connection to a server somehow fail, the client will just crash. I’m planning to implement functions for connection errors.

That’s all I have to report for today, come back next Tuesday for more information on how the memory leak(s) went.

Cheers!
/Kevin