Corona-cation (Day 17)

Why is online so hard?


    So I continued my adventures in networking and I have had one minor success. That success being that I figured out how to test an online session over LAN. That is to just not "use LAN" when finding sessions. It sounds simple when I say it like that but it's actually really great because now I can test all I want from home. 
    That was really the only god thing that I found today, everything else wasn't all too helpful. I tried going back to the IP based connection but that didn't work still. I tried using public IP's and no luck. I manually opened port 7777 (unreal's default port) in my firewall and still no luck. After I opened the port I tried again with the sessions system but that failed as well. 
    I have decided for the time being that I am going to try to use the sessions system just because that gives me more options readily without any extra effort. After I decided this I did lots of reading into the online subsystem. It is very interesting but I still feel I only have a cursory understanding of all of it. 
    Tomorrow I will try port-forwarding the port 7777. Many people on the discussion boards have said that this is a solution. Seriously though, it takes this much effort to make a simple online game? I have a new respect for super complex online games and online games that run smoothly or at all.


    I have also joined a team for the game jam coming up and we have brainstormed some ideas. We came up with the idea of a puzzle game where, to my understanding, you constantly move forward and you can only take a step backwards once or under certain conditions. Seems like a cool idea but we haven't started making it yet so we'll see how it goes.

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