Our short-term goal is implementing non-blocking and Async HTTP/HTTPS server to Unreal Engine 5 and running them on FRunnableThread to make high performance (both Unreal project and HTTP server) services with 3D capabilities.
Our long-term goal is integrating HTTP/2 server to UE5. For this reason, we will develope multiple plugins with different third party libraries. You can say that each plugin will be that library's experiment. After achieving our HTTP/2 goal, only that library will be the main one. But blueprint workflow will be same.
Ithewei LibHv https://github.com/ithewei/libhv
- MBedTLS
- NGHTTP2 (Optional)
Instructions- Copy contents of dependencies include to
libhv/include - Create a folder with name
libin libhv's root directory. - Copy all .lib files to created
libfolder.
- Copy contents of dependencies include to
- HTTPS Server implementation
- More advance response (for example, response headers)
We won't integrate any database and JSON libraries to this plugin. Because we believe that accessing datasources and parsing message formats are NOT HTTP server plugin's job. Unreal Engine has lots of JSON plugins in its ecosystem.
(We will improve this after finishing implementation.)
- Spawn HTTP_Server_LHV actor
- Define its properties (port, server name and etc.)
- Create "Bind Event to Delegate HTTP Lib Hv"
- Create correct custom event and attach it to delegate (HTTP Connection LHV object referance)
- HTTP Connection LHV has lots of helper functions to "Get Body, Get Path, Get Headers, Find Header, Get Content Type". You can use these to parse request and create correct response for your needs.
- Use "Send Response" node from HTTP Connection LHV object to send response.
- You can use "Cancel Request" to cancel HTTP request.
- Execution chain will be on FRunnableThread. So, if you need to use functions which requires specific threads such as "Game Thread, Render Thread or Audio Thread", it will cause crash.
We won't have a plan to support other platforms than Windows like Linux, Mac, Android and iOS. If you need other platforms, build your library and implement it to your fork.
We support "only" current engine release. We update our plugin "after one month" when there is a new one. (For example, current engine release at December 2023 is Unreal Engine 5.3.2. We only support this version. When 5.4 released, we will update it after one month and there will be no 5.3 support. If you need it, it is your responsibility to solve breaking changes on your fork. We won't support preview releases.)
If you need support about "HTTP Server libraries", post issue on their GitHub repo. We just implement their library to Unreal Engine. But we can help you about Unreal Engine related problems.