It's time once again for the monthly BLOG POST

I never intend to make one post a month, it just happens that way.  Approximately once a month, a decent development is made.  Every time I end on an optimistic note, saying that I hope I can get to writing about actual gameplay soon.  I suppose last time I did the settings, this time the other major hurdle has been cleared.

I'm talking about multiplayer.

Although all of the functionality isn't there and the whole thing has yet to be tested thoroughly, I can proudly say that I seem to be able to host an online game, get a list of online games (through a 'join game' menu) and then join that game.
If you've been keeping up with us for the entire time, you'll know this is a huge accomplishment for us.  We poked around with the Unreal's limited Blueprint multiplayer support during the prototype, but after a couple of infuriating weeks, we gave up on that aspect with the conclusion that the available Blueprint stuff simply wasn't able to give us what we wanted.

AND NOW IT WE HAVE WHAT WE WANTED.  I really do hope that everything is working as well as it seems.  I also really need to thank roomon1 on the Unreal AnswerHub for being awesomesauce and basically making this happen.  Here's the question-thread that led to this post.

So now that that tremendous headache's out of the way, we can jump right into the fun stuff!  JK, I still have some holes to patch up in the MP system and I have to glue everything I've currently got (a little bit) together.
By that I mean I have to make sure that all of the backbone stuff like multiplayer and settings and the plugin-based approach I'm taking to this (oh right that I have to talk about that too) all work in a cobbled-together way.

But finally I can finally see the part where I'm not working on infrastructure anymore and am making stuff I can take screenshots of.  Hopefully something can be put together before I leave for game dev college in August.  That's somewhat of a mini-deadline for me since I know that after that starts up I'll have school projects to worry about and won't barely be able to put any time into this.  Hopefully I'll have it to the point where my partner Khan can take over.

Speaking of him, he's been doing some really cool stuff recently (and in the past as well).  I should get him to post things here...

Anyway, see you in a month (or less if something cool happens).