Unreal Engine 5.8 C++ Multiplayer First Person Shooter (Udemy.com)

In this course, you will learn how to program a multiplayer First-Person Shooter from scratch using industry best practices. This project scales to AAA quality competitive games, but also works for small indie games and single-player shooters.

With our data driven approach, we will create a scalable shooter game project designed to be extended with new capabilities and weapon types by changing adding assets and data, but not needing to alter existing code. Data assets store animations and montages, icons and UI messages, and our code references them efficiently with Gameplay Tags.

An asset pack is provided for this course, including all meshes, animations, weapons, sounds, Niagara system FX, and icons we will be using throughout the course. No need to find free assets or retarget animations.

In this course, you will learn:

• How to set up first and third-person meshes for first-person shooters in multiplayer

• Setting up Enhanced Input for handling locomotion as well as shooter-specific inputs like firing, reloading, cycling, and aiming

• Creating a weapon inventory with weapon cycling, designed for any number of weapons. Rifle and Pistol meshes are provided

• Creating Data Assets for efficiently organizing animations and montages that our character Animation Blueprints reference to easily blend to the correct pose based on the current weapon

• Creating a full-fledged Animation Blueprint for both first and third person meshes, with aim offsets, hand IK, strafing, jumping, crouching, and turn-in-place with orientation warping. All animations are provided.

• Implementing Client-Side Prediction for Ammo, retaining server-side authority while keeping the client-side experience responsive and instantaneous

• Implementing weapon aiming, with aim animations and field-of-view zooming and look-sensitivity adjustment

• Weapon firing in multiplayer for both automatic and semi-auto fire

• Weapon fire effects, including muzzle flashes, impact particles, weapon trails, bullet hole decals, and dynamically-changing effects based on the physical surface hit (concrete, glass, character). Weapon fire sounds and weapon animations and shell-eject particles.

• UI displaying health, ammo, reserve ammo, and player score.

• Dynamically-changing reticles that switch per weapon, animated with dynamic material instance parameters. Reticles expand, shrink and morph, and change color with weapon fire, aiming, and targeting other players

• Reloading weapons, adding ammo with ammo pickups, automatic reload when emptying the weapon, picking up ammo with an empty weapon, and swapping to an empty weapon

• Causing damage, detecting head shots, implementing player elimination and respawning

• Collecting player stats and displaying UI messages in response to special elims, including:

  • Gaining and losing the lead, and tying the leader.

  • First blood (getting the first elimination)

  • Showstopper (ending someone's spree)

  • Elim streak

  • Spree

  • Dethrone (eliminating the leader)

  • Revenge (eliminating the last person who defeated you)

  • Sequential (double elim, triple elim, etc)

  • Headshot elim

• Collecting stats such as hits and missed shots, elims, and defeats

The project we create in this course works on:

• Dedicated Servers

• Listen Servers

• Single-player, standalone mode

and we test all three modes in the PIE (play-in editor)

This course is the culmination of over a decade of heavy Unreal Engine C++ multiplayer experience. It is programmed according to the SOLID software design principles and architected for modularity and scalability.

This course assumes you already understand C++ and have created C++ projects in Unreal Engine. Knowledge of Unreal Engine multiplayer concepts is a plus, but not required. If you've taken my Multiplayer C++ CRASH COURSE, you are prepared for this course.

You will have access to the Druid Mechanics Discord Community, where students are already showing off their progress with this course, and some are using their own custom assets for their shooter games!

I hope you're excited to create a First-Person Shooter!
See you soon,

Stephen