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Photon Cloud, Voice and Chat - Multiplayer plugin

xixgames - Code Plugins - Sep 18, 2019

Multiplayer Realtime, Voice and Chat with Photon Relay Server in the Cloud

  • Supported Platforms
  • Supported Engine Versions
    4.22 - 4.27, 5.0 - 5.3
  • Download Type
    Engine Plugin
    This product contains a code plugin, complete with pre-built binaries and all its source code that integrates with Unreal Engine, which can be installed to an engine version of your choice then enabled on a per-project basis.

Create multiplayer games other way than using Online subsystem. Using Photon Cloud, no dedicated needed.

You will be able to control all the aspects in the framework.

Instead of using Unreal's built-in networking where you need to run UE4 game server instances that UE4 game client instances connect to and players host game, you avoid all this problematic having a cloud server online.

It comes in very handy for this situation as it provides hosting. Due to the amount of Photon customers and an aggressive pricing this is usually cheaper than hosting servers yourself full-stop. You can also create your own Photon Server Self Hosted on Windows.

This plugin does not need an Unreal server (dedicated), it is using a Photon Cloud (Chat or Voice) Relay server that lives in the region you connect to (property of Photon).

It offers matchmaking and scalability, but is not a replacement of UE4 Networking, nor uses it.

Replicator Component Video

Networking features video (4.25+)

Photon Cloud Gameplay Subsystem video update (UE 4.27 and 5.0 support)

How to add multiplayer to the UE5 FPS template using this plugin:

Part 1 | Part 2 [ source ]


Photon is fully cross-platform, which makes it possible to mix clients that use other UE4 clients or mix them with non-UE4 clients for any other engine, including all the known game engines and custom self-made game engines and you can mix them with clients that run without any game engine, as well.


The user code just tells the Photon Client that it wants to create or join a game and Photon cares about what game server an existing room can be found on and which game server has free capacities that the new room can be created on it. The user code does not have to know how many game servers there are, how much rooms and users the hardware on a certain game server can handle or under which address it can be reached. As the server is a relay, you can play with just an stand alone client.

Latest features video

DEMOS:

Technical Details

Multiplayer Features:

  • Create/Join rooms
  • Send/receive custom player, lobby, and room properties
  • Send/receive custom data for players and actors (not properties)
  • Convert Photon Data to Unreal
  • Web Hooks
  • Auth login (custom server, Facebook, Steam, PSN)
  • Text Chat
  • Voice Chat (iOS and Mac has no input yet -depends on the engine-)

Code Modules:

  • Photon Cloud, Voice & Chat API as BP libraries
  • Extensible API
  • Made as Subsystems

Network Replicated: custom (not Unreal)

Supported Development Platforms: Windows, Mac

Supported Target Build Platforms: Windows, Hololens, PS4/PS5, XBox, Android, iOS, MacOS, Switch

Documentation: https://photonue4.xixgames.com

Demo projects: https://github.com/juaxix/photon_api_ue4_sample

Changes:

2.0: Photon Voice (4.26+). Using Photon 5 [ project ]

1.6: New architecture (4.25+). New PhotonCloud Subsystem [video1 | video2]

1.5: UTF8 fix - actor deprecated

1.4: Groups of interests

1.3: Replicator Component

1.2: Chat and Friends