We’re new to UE4 (we come from the Unity world), and in a future game we plan to realize on this engine, we would like to have some persistent data storage in order to save the profile and the games of our players in a database on the net.
Our first thoughts were to have a backend web service managing this database on the net that would be triggered by the client of the game through HTTP requests…
But what are your ideas about this? Are there some libraries allowing us to do that? Some plugins or services like Yahoo Games Network? The most effective way to achieve that goal?
The short answer is that if you’re trying to create a game where a player’s character has persistence across multiple sessions, you will need to do some online work on your own to allow for that. We have online mechanisms to help you out, but we are not providing you with an out of the box server infrastructure for online games. There are many ways to achieve the goal of persistence – you’ll need to figure out what makes the most sense for your game.
No problem if we have to code the thing ourselves, I was wondering if we have access to some libraries allowing to make some requests on a distant server?
Can I for instance include this C++ library into my project in order to make some HTTP requests to a RESTful web service handling these records? https://code.google.com/p/ffead-cpp/
What would you recommend as an architecture in order to make some sporadic saves of the players game? Is it acceptable to have such a RESTful web service on a distant server with a DB (a Java/Spring or JavaEE server for instance) receving secured HTTP requests with JSON data in order to make these saves?
We already have a cross-platform HTTP module inside the engine that you can use to make RESTful calls to web services. Take a look at the “HTTP” module, and also search for IHttpRequest and IHttpResponse in the source code to see examples.