Dev Log 5# Learning about seamless travel and player net roles

Now that my player can travel to the lobby I need to be able to send them to my actual game map which I quickly threw together it's just the learning kit games map with some adjustments made to it. As it's quite time-consuming I'm going to work on the functionality of my game and then make it look pretty at the end.

I learnt about the difference between non seamless travel and seamless travel where non seamless disconnects you from the server and then reconnects you back to same one which can result in reconnection issues and less immersive experience. Seamless travel is really easy to enable you just need a transition map and to set the boolean for seamless travel to true in the game mode. The reason for the empty transition level is that the current lobby map has to be deconstructed and since a map must always be loaded in Unreal the transition map is loaded whilst the game map is being constructed. Seamless travel will provide a smoother experience for players when loading into a game.

I also created an overhead widget for the player to help me learn about player net roles in which I created a function that can display the player's net role. When testing using my computer as a listen server I can see that all players have the role of authority in the main editor as only the the server can authorise player's action events such as item pick ups. Clients will have the role of autonomous proxy and other players in the game that are being controlled by other clients will have the role simulated proxy. I don't need the players to see their net role so I will remove it but the overhead widget will be useful for displaying health bars and other UI similar to that.

(Game map: Current state)