...and videos!

Recorded training mission with Jay. Setup was a dedicated server running on my machine where i joined and Jay connecting over internet from the other end of the western hemisphere. Still quite not perfect but it's playable.

Han: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wI8MGG3oRg
Jay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nVEzHEabLQ

Game did actually have a buildin multiplayer, but they did change an awful lot of things in gameplay i had to undo. In the end it would have been easier and less work if they would not have added their own multiplayer (Game was always shipped with an IpDrv).

However, their multiplayer just used a fraction of the features what was in the game and when you would load up a singleplayer map on a dedicated server and join as a client pretty much nothing did work out of the box.

Haven't checked that particular flag, but whether it's upper or lowercase should not matter. But I noticed another issue with names (of flags) they if you use them clientside that adding DeusExConText.u to serverpackages solved the issues. However starting replicating flags was a bad idea anyway..

Maybe another reason was that I put the flag names as strings into the travelinfo and without it might have caused a missmatch in the mapping of ints to names which might have changed upon level transition.

Basically I'm saving the state of the map like it was done in singleplayer. A savegame is created for each map you leave (which is basically just a map package with some editor related data removed). Afterwards you can simply open the map. However that caused a lot of issues first with network roles crappity smacked up on client, package missmatches, etc, so I came up with the idea to conform the savegames to the original maps as this engine feature works on all kinds of packages. Not only did it solve those issues, but it even removed the need for the client to download the maps. Remember, when a network client loads a map he basically deletes every actor which is not bStatic or bNoDelete.

However this triggered a heavy cascade of garbage collection related issues as Deus Ex makes heavy use of Objects instead of Actors (Windows, DeusExGoal, DeusExNote, EventManager, FlagBase. etc.). And nearly every non Actor object did cause crashes. So with a lot of cleanup code to remove Object->Actor references and vice versa, rewritting parts, killing EventManager during travel, etc. I managed to get the dedicated server stable, the client largely stable, while the listen server still remains a bit crashy. However with rewriting of some parts to remove the Objects this will likely getting stable too.

For storing non map related gamestate, like goals, flags, datavault images aquired, I use some Actor (called HXSteve) which basically stores these instead of a player and use the TravelInfo to carry it over map transitions.

[]KAOS[]Casey wrote on Oct 15^th, 2015 at 4:19pm:

Took me actually a few months to come up with that solution. Before I tried all kinds of stuff like checking/fixing/netroles, etc, ... just a lot of awful trial and error.

However I have no special handling for MyLevel, basically just:

		FString SaveDir = SaveDirString( DirectoryIndex );
		FString IniFile = SaveDir + TEXT("\\Save.ini");

		GFileManager->MakeDirectory( *SaveDir );

		FString ConformPackage, ConformFile;
		INT Generation = 0;

		GConfig->GetInt( TEXT("Generations"), *(LevelInfo->MapName), Generation, *IniFile );

		ConformPackage = LevelInfo->MapName + TEXT("_OLD");
		ConformFile = FString::Printf( TEXT("..\\Maps\\%s.dx"), *(LevelInfo->MapName) );

		FString SaveFile = FString::Printf( TEXT("%s\\%s.s%02d"), *SaveDir, *(LevelInfo->MapName), Generation + 1 );

		BeginLoad();
		ULinkerLoad* OldLinker = GetPackageLinker( CreatePackage( NULL, *ConformPackage ), *ConformFile, LOAD_NoWarn | LOAD_NoVerify, NULL, NULL );
		EndLoad();
 

One thing which is still odd, is that I can't overwrite the current loaded map (save) package, so I need to increment the filename/extension and keep track of it manually.
However one approach could be to save it to a temporary name and move it once the new map is loaded.