How can I set up pathfinding of a pawn of a player controller in a networked game?

Hello,

I’m developing a basket ball game.

I would like, when a basket is scored, to move all players to pre-defined spots on the court, where they will be able to do the throw in.

To move the bots, I use the function AAIController::MoveToLocation, and everything goes fine, either in a standalone game or in a networked game.

The problem is with the player controllers: in a standalone game, everything is fine, whereas when networking is involved, the pawns move to their destination, but the movement is jerky.

To make the pawns of the player controller move, I tried two solutions (which are pretty similar):

  • The first solution was to use the UNavigationSystem class, and call SimpleMoveToLocation on it.
  • The other solution consisted in implementing in my custom PlayerController class almost the same code found in AAIController. But the result is the same as the code above.

My guess for the jerky movement is that the component which manages the position the pawn must be along the path is in conflict with the server movement prediction.

I’ve started to dig in the source code of PlayerController, to check if I can override a function to disable this behavior while the pawn is in pathfinding mode, but I didn’t have much success until now.

I was also thinking to another solution, and I’d like your opinion about that: do you think it would be a good idea, when I use pathfinding on a player controller, to switch the controller of the pawn to an AIController, then execute the path finding and the moving of the pawn to the desired location, and when the pawn is there, switch back to the previous PlayerController?

Or do you think there may be another solution?

Thanks in advance

I have the same problem, but with a MOBA-type control scheme. I’m afraid I can’t switch to an AI controller everytime I need to pathfind. Did you come up with something that suited your needs?

Unfortunately no :confused:

Wanna brainstorm with me with what could be causing this?
I’m thinking that the client-prediction (since it has no path to follow) has something to do with it. But then again the server is in total control here, and it should still move the clients pawn forcefully if it had to. The client shouldn’t have any control of the positioning or translation of the pawn in the end.