Functional Lobby and More Visual Feedback - Ryan Brown

Let's start with the main thing I did over the last few days: the multiplayer lobby menu. It is now (almost) fully functional. Last time I went over some concerns with how I'm going to get player ping and kicking players working. That's all working. And those were actually some of the easier parts to implement, as ping is already accessible through player states, and kicking players functions pretty much exactly the way I began to theorize in my last post. The real difficulty of the menu was displaying information on all clients individually and server travel between levels. These issues combined required me to migrate all previous multiplayer session logic to the game instance, as well as create a new level, a new gamemode, and a new player controller just for this single screen to properly use RPCs. But, the result speaks for itself:

Next, I added a feature to the stratagem menu that allows specific stratagems to pop out onto the screen when they become available for use if they hadn't been available already. The following video shows this feature off, but there's a few specific edge cases that will be appearing quite quickly. I had to create specific behavior for each of these edge cases, so I'd like to take note of them for context. First, when I throw a jet stratagem, the "Jet Rearm" stratagem appears above it before going away, because its availability is triggered by the stratagem I threw. Next, killing my teammate triggers the reinforcement stratagem to become available, so it appears without overlapping the existing reinforcement icon. When the jet stratagem I threw earlier comes off cooldown, the animation also triggers on it. Finally, I enter a cheat to allow the extraction stratagem to trigger the animation, but I cancel the animation by opening the full menu, and it doesn't disrupt anything or look strange when I do so:

The last things I added to the project over the last few days are generally much smaller tweaks. I migrated the loading screen creation to the base gameplay gamemode so it no longer needs to be added to levels individually. In a previous post, I mentioned that the logic for healing stim updates on the UI was already implemented but not functioning, now it is. Along with that, I created a new custom material for a healing effect whenever a stim is used, and added an animation to fade the material in and out on the Player HUD:

The only problem I'm facing at the moment has to do with the loading screen. For some reason, despite the creation of the loading screen being the first thing that occurs when a new player controller connects to a level, everyone but the host sees the unloaded level for a split second before the loading screen has a chance to appear. The only solution to this I know of is to reorder our level structure to be within a persistent level, but I find that to be a bit daunting at this stage of development, and I'm not even sure if it works with multiplayer server travel. So if anyone knows a work-around I'd be happy to hear it.