The Journey to Multiplayer, Part 3 - Joshua Newton

This week, I continued to study multiplayer replication. The actual concepts aren't that difficult for me to follow, but they are difficult to incorporate into an existing project that was not made with multiplayer in mind. In the above videos you can note that I have successfully replicated guns into other players' hands, but there's still a lot of bugs. For example, on the client side, movement is stuttering. I believe this has something to do with how I added replication to the player characters, but I have yet to find the root cause. It almost seems like the server is moving the position of the client at the same time as the client is trying to move, resulting in a choppy look.

While the replication is posing some challenges, I've discussed with my team and we've decided that we need to revisit our code base and its  organization. I will be using this opportunity to rewrite the player character with multiplayer replication in mind. My hope is that starting fresh while we still haven't gotten too deep into development will save time in the long run.

I also worked on small tasks for the team that needed to be completed before we put out our final build for the first month. One of the attached videos shows off this work. We needed an enemy mesh with animations so that the enemies felt a bit more lifelike. I found the current enemy asset and implemented its animation in the game. This was a fairly striaghtforward process that posed little challenge after finding the asset.

Another task I accomplished was completing the game loop by implementing the player win condition. We already had most of the code written but it had yet to be hooked up properly. So I modified how the extraction zone worked to hookup my teammates' existing win menu with an extraction that you can complete after a specific wave. For the sake of demonstration, this is set to wave 1 in the above video. However, in the proper game build it will be set to something higher.

Moving forward, I'm going to continue to lead the team in creating networking features for the game. My hope is to share my new knowledge with the others so that everyone can work more efficiently.