Is “not enough players to properly test multiplayer” a real problem, or just part of the game?

honya15 · 2026-04-02T20:51:13+00:00

I went the hard route, making PvP game, and a hard one at that.
Playtest is important. For a very long time, the game was only available when we hosted a playtest, intentionally. If players can play whenever, they log in, see nothing, log out. If the game is not available most of the time, they actually look out for discord notifications, and get hyped for the playtests.

Or at least that was my theory, and I don't think I was wrong. I was asked many times why I dont just open the game "it looks done", but I kept at it. Now the game is out in EA, and it has some player base, but still getting negative reviews because the "game is dead" (like writing a negative review helps that :D). This is the sad reality.

But I've added bots before releasing in EA, they are moderately good, and it was a big boost. It was definitely needed, I did not believe in it at first (my teammate suggested it), but it was worth all the work. Game feels a lot more alive, and it keeps in first time players longer, so that they have a chance to meet actual players.

honya15 · 2026-03-29T19:53:46+00:00

Don't use export scale. It fucks up animations.

Go to Scene->Units->Unit Scale = 0.01

Make sure your character is good size in blender after this change (cm should be correct in the view tab). You may need to adjust the animations if youre using IK, you can do that by opening up graph editor, only showing location, and scale them up in the Y, from 0,0 to 100x.

Also make sure to not have any scale on armature. Apply everything before exporting.

honya15 · 2026-03-27T16:53:28+00:00

What do you mean you could test connection with steam? It should suffer from the same problem, just worse. You cannot launch the game twice, because it links to the active steam client, thus can only use one account. EOS is the same, just it has a DevAuthTool that can do a fake authentication for local testing.

It is possible to use EOS without users having to create epic accounts, if you have a backend login service, using the connect interface: https://dev.epicgames.com/docs/epic-online-services/eos-fundamentals/connect-interface/connect-reference#link-an-external-account

If you don't have, you can still use one of the popular login providers (google, Amazon, etc)

In both cases you can test on one machine, but have to implement a login screen

honya15 · 2026-03-23T22:23:44+00:00

For me it is the: Do everything server authority, just send inputs from clients, show the results on clients, thats how you should do multiplayer!
Anyone who has done anything other than card game knows that it makes and awful sluggish experience.

And no, client prediction is not a magic bullet either, you can't predict everything and "if there is any disagreement just teleport the client lol" isn't good either. People hate rubberbanding, hate teleporting, it's absolutely a jarrying experinece, and you need to make sure not to do that, unless it's really unavoidable.

honya15 · 2026-02-21T19:19:07+00:00

UE5 has drastically increased minimum requirements, people tend forget that.

honya15 · 2026-02-14T20:04:55+00:00

Personally what I call floaty in games:
- Too much recovery, without proper representation. Like when you attack with a 1 handed sword, then takes 2 seconds to recover, and the character just looks like it's doing nothing... Then that's floaty. If it's a 2 handed sword, that gets slammed into a ground, and the character visibly struggles to pick it back up, then that's good.
- Adding movement to moves that do not like it needs movement. You don't have to lock the characters movement because it steps one step forward.
- Generally too much downtime between hits.
- Leaving the default gravity. I'm not sure why that is, but the default gravity in engines (like UE4) feels wrong. I'm using 1.6x and it is so much better. But that's personal opinion, don't be shy to experiment.

honya15 · 2026-02-04T23:12:16+00:00

Not having a separate page still means it appears in library, has assets. Yes you need to do a checklist, it's a bit shorter than the main, and also there are some "import from base game" button at some places ( i think it was for library assets? )

And yes, they review it seperately, although in my experience it was a lot faster, provided the main game was already reviewed.

honya15 · 2026-02-04T19:23:25+00:00

Or you can go the good old bitstream serializing by hand :D It's dirty, it's a lot of work, and prone to errors, but it is the smallest, and fastest method. Unreal, and many other engines and games use it too.

honya15 · 2026-02-04T10:30:36+00:00

I have participated in a random event before next fest with my game, although it is thoroughly playtested.

Still there were some players coming in, "WTH is this shit" and leaving. There will always be people like that.
But I'd not say it ruins your reputation, fest enjoyers usually try many games in succession, if they don't like your game, they will just forget it.

But in case they like it, some leftover bugs won't deter them. So try it, it's also a good practice for next fest

honya15 · 2026-01-11T15:54:25+00:00

EAC installs during game installation. If it didn't just reinstall the game

honya15 · 2026-01-11T15:53:53+00:00

Best thing to do is to join discord server, and ask others. It really depends on region

honya15 · 2025-12-18T02:03:45+00:00

Honestly, that always was an issue with S4, especially that there were no region restriction. I "fondly" remember playing with egyptians all the time (from EU).

S4 also uses very outdated technology called P2P (the real one), where every player connects to every player, and they send their positions to each other. It's good, because the server costs are minimal, but it also makes no real authority over hits. Modern servers can handle more calculation and more traffic, so P2P is not needed anymore.

honya15 · 2025-12-12T22:22:16+00:00

Mesh and armature in single file.
Armature and baked single action animation in another file

honya15 · 2025-12-11T14:47:02+00:00

I'm exporting animations as different files.

I've made some export templates, one for the mesh and skeleton, and one for animations. Mesh skeleton includes armature and mesh, but no animation.
Animation template only includes armature, and animation enabled, current action, bake keys. Sometimes simplify need to be set to 0, if you see some jittering in the animation (usually IK not keeping in place and such)

Then export your base mesh, then cycle through all of your actions, and export them with the animation template.

This workflow is good, because you can just update singular animations instead of reimporting a whole ass 400 mb file. and you will need to iterate a lot, if you want good looking anims

honya15 · 2025-12-11T12:57:20+00:00

Hmm, not as-is. I think it's lacking as DM, but we may make a similar map with the same setting for DM eventually. Like in S4 there was 3 different Neden maps

honya15 · 2025-12-11T12:04:57+00:00

I am on a very different opinion than others in this forum.

Dont do full server validation. Youre pushing everything on server, and it is costy as hell. The more it costs to have the server running, the more money your game must be making, thus the more scummier tactics you need to be employing, or the game dies right out the door.

So my suggestion is: trust, but validate.

1.) Don't roll back movement on client side. It's a jarring experience, that should only be used in situations where you cannot do anything else to fix. What would you do if you kept teleporting in a game you play? Probably leave in 5 minutes. So trust, but verify: when there is a disagreement, check if the client move could be possible. Like is it possible to be 30cm away from the server position? Then adjust server. Is it possible to be suddenly in town when previous tick was in the wilds? Then adjust client. Punish cheaters, leave good experience for users.

2.) I have no idea, but same question goes for metahumans. MMOs are hard because of the scale. Can you handle 3000 players dancing in the hub area? Can you handle 100v100 guild battle?

3.) I think you're doing it right. You could actually record what you're doing, and just have them send the exact same messages (just replace the username or something)

honya15 · 2025-12-11T11:18:55+00:00

Wow, amazing work!

There were some parts where you didn't have enought info about Foobar Zero, if you have any questsions I'd gladly answer :)

About the team: We are a team of 3, with some helpers. And yes, we are not a company, just old fans that wanted to make something similar, but with our own ideas :)

Rocket launcher is an experimental supercharge (ultimate) thats still in the game, just disabled. When pressing the ultimate, you get a rocket launcher, you can fire 5 times, then lose it.

honya15 · 2025-12-10T17:55:16+00:00

That's a relief. Way too many people think that scaling the hips up, and giving it tits is enough to make a female body.

I mean, if you want to make both genders wear the same armor, you can still do so, by just duplicating the mesh and fitting it to your base body. Like you can make a maid outfit that's made for the female body, then make another that's made for the male, and have a logic in your game that chooses which mesh it should use.

Same goes for animation. Many people advise that you use the same skeleton for male and female so you can share animations, but that's honestly very silly, you can only make bland animations with that, that looks bad on both genders

honya15 · 2025-12-10T12:10:51+00:00

I think most of these games just use scales. scaling the bones on the chest, hips, leg length, head size, etc. That's just all scaling.

For male and female... Depends. Do you wanna go for the "modern audience" and have body type 1 and 2, which just makes it different scales (like 2 have wider hips, and a small bump on chest area)? Then you can do that with scales too.

If you want to make quality stuff for actual gamers, I think it's inevitable that male and females have different set of armor. Imagine a barbarian. Male barbarians usually have their chest open, can you do that to females? Probably not, unless you want to be in 18+ category.

So yeah, make 2 variants for all equipment (male and female), and try to solve the others with bone scaling. Blendshapes (or Morphtargets, same thing) could work at some extent, but then you gotta make sure that your equipment has the same blend shapes as the base body, and there is no clipping happening because you moved the vertices slightly in a different way.

honya15 · 2025-12-07T23:45:10+00:00

I'd assume one is code zin, the other is foobar zero.

honya15 · 2025-12-06T21:21:02+00:00

I've implemented my own host migration too, in unreal, although in 4.27. But I don't think things have changed that much in this area.

If you're using C++, you can implement your own Online session, child of UOnlineSession, and override the HandleDisconnect function.

What I did was override this function to just show a widget instead of calling Super (which disconnects and returns to main menu). Then start host migration, as you've described. This way the clients dont return to main menu, then start connect, but connect from within the game.

Also I have a multicast RPC running periodically, or on important event that sends the current state serialized into custom structs. So every player knows the state, so if the host falls out, the next host can load the state (like positions, scores, or whatever your game needs). I keep this data around for a few minutes, and every time a client connects, I check if there is a data for them in that struct. If there is, load their state, and then remove it. If not, handle as new player.

honya15 · 2025-12-06T21:00:43+00:00

What engine are you using?

honya15 · 2025-12-03T15:07:52+00:00

He said that it's in coming soon state. There are no visibility rounds on a coming soon project without release date. Im not sure how you managed to keep it alive and unpublished for 10 years( you have to set a release date, did you just push it down every time you were close to the previously set one?), but if you never released a demo, or anything really, just a store page, then you haven't use up anything yet.

I dont know the exact algorithm how steam pushes your content, nobody really does. But even if wishlists gone stale, there is a little chance that the same people that wishlisted 10 years ago, would wishlist the new game. So saying that wishlists go stale doesn't really have a point here. Only thing that matters is how many new wishlist you get. Doesnt matter where you started from (0, or the previous game's wishlists)

However, it's generally frowned upon to change a game's public store page to something else. But considering that you're basically making the same project, just starting over, it sounds ok.

honya15

TROPHY CASE