Dev Log 1# “Learning About Unreal's Online Subsystem”

I plan on making my third person shooter multiplayer to help me improve in multiple aspects of programming, such as gameplay, networking , UI etc. Since this is a solo project for the foreseeable future this will also enhance my ability to work inside unreal engine as I’m sure I’ll learn many things working in the editor.

As of right now I’ve been learning about Unreal’s Online Subsystem as it’s designed to simplify the implementation of online features for developers like who don’t have the low level knowledge about networking protocols. So far I’ve learnt about the importance of delegates and callbacks in Unreal as they are important for event handlings.

Delegates in Unreal Engine act as containers for functions, enabling efficient event handling. Think of them as lists of functions waiting to be executed when an event occurs. This event could be anything from a player action to an animation completion. In the context multiplayer plugin these events will be the Session Interface Functions which will be bound to my Menu class which contain functions that allow players to travel to in game maps and what’ll they see in the UI.

Callbacks, in the context of delegates, refer to the functions you attach to a delegate. When the associated event occurs, the delegate invokes these functions. Callbacks are vital for altering the behaviour of delegates dynamically. You can add or remove functions from a delegate’s list, enabling you to control which actions should be triggered in response to specific events. So for example when the player creates a session the callback will add the delegate bound to the create session function then a callback will remove the create session delegate regardless of whether create session returned successful or failure.