UE5MultiplayerChatPlugin

Multiplayer chat plugin for UE5 with basic ingame logging and command parsing capability

The look'n'feel is entirely based on the chat system from the game Everquest as it was in the 2000'.

It comes with a lot of predefined functions that run out of the box, but still require some implementation on the project side to handle RPCs notably.

This plugin is going to be maintained and modified as it is part of another bigger personal project. Functions and interfaces are subject to sudden changes.

Integration example

To see an integrated example go check out https://github.com/Synock/UE5PluginIntegration

General consideration

Predefined types of chat

There are several predefined and ready to use chat types:

• Say is a local, around the player chat with a default range of 5m.
• Tell is a private messaging based on another player name.
• Group is a group based chat.
• Raid is raid based chat.
• Guild is a guild based chat.
• Shout is server based chat intended for in character zone discussions.
• Out Of Character is a server based chat intended for out of character zone discussions.
• Auction is a server buy/sell chat.

Note that the style of the speaker is predefined to be different from the style of the player hearing it.

Logging and Logging replication

An array of ingame logging possibilities are available, allowing for both replicated logging stuff in an area, like spell casting, damage IO, and not replicated logging, such as XP gains.

Interfaces

There are three interfaces that you must inherit from in order for the plugin to work as expected.

IHUDChatInterface

This interface is supposed to be implemented in your main HUD, it must be returnable by your PlayerController. Its function is to be a gateway between player controller and UI.

You only have one single pure virtual function to override which is GetChatBoxWidget. This function must return a pointer toward your Chat UI to the ChatBox.

IGameModeChatInterface

This interface is meant to be implemented within your game mode. It contains the core, server only based functions.

There is a default implementation for all the functions but it may advisable to override them to fit your needs.

The following functions actually does nothing with the given implementation and needs to be overriden to be functional:

• GetGroupMembers Return the group members of the same group as a player.
• GetRaidMembers Return the raid members of the same group as a player.
• GetGuildMembers Return the raid members of the same group as a player.
• SendMessageToOtherServer Is meant to be a function to send message across different servers (using REST or whatever).

Log oriented functions are also present, these allow to replicate logs based on the world around a particular location.

• AddLogInArea allow to add a log to every player present in an area
• AddLogAroundPlayer allows to add log to every player around another player, excluding this last one.

IPlayerChatInterface

This is the main workhorse of the plugin, this interface contains most of the functions, and also ALL the functions that you must override.

Pure virtual functions

There are several pure virtuals functions that you must redefine because they are dependant on you project

1. GetChatHUD This function must return your main HUD, the one that implement the HUDChatInterface interface.
2. GetChatName This function must return a name for each of your player to be displayed in chat.

There's also several functions that you must override because they are RPCs (and i don't know any way to define RPC in Interfaces). Note that in this case, a minimum viable code is provided in the functions documentation, so you should be able to copy/paste it quickly to have a working prototype.

1. Client_AddChatData Add chat data to the client using a color and a category
2. Client_AddChatDataType Add chat data to the client using a predefined message type
3. Server_AreaSpeak Server side implementation of chat within an area around the player, appears in white
4. Server_ShoutSpeak Server side implementation of chat within the whole map, appear in red.
5. Server_OOCSpeak Server side implementation of chat within the whole map, appear in dark green.
6. Server_AuctionSpeak Server side implementation of chat within the whole map, appear in green.
7. Server_GroupSpeak Server side implementation of chat in a group, appear in light blue.
8. Server_TellSpeak Server side implementation of private chat to another player, appear purple.
9. Server_RaidSpeak Server side implementation of chat in a raid (group of groups), appear pink.
10. Server_GuildSpeak Server side implementation of chat in guild, appear light green.

Functions you might want to override to fit your needs

1. IsInGroup return true if the character is in a group, default implementation always returns false.
2. IsInRaid return true if the character is in a raid, default implementation always returns false.
3. IsInGuild return true if the character is in a guild, default implementation always returns false.
4. ProcessCommands Process commands entered through the chat window. Default does nothing.

UI

Plugin UI is minimalist and should give you just something to work with. There are two main c++ classes and their inherited Blueprint Objects

1. ChatBoxWidget which is chatbox widget with a chat type selection box, a chat input and a chat display.
2. ChatLineWidget which is an individual line of the chat that will appear in ChatBoxWidget. Note this object make use of RichText.

A Blueprint Object of particular interest would be DT_ChatStyle which contains the different styles of text that can be displayed.

Otherwise there are some helper blueprint objects such as SChatLine and OChatLine that are used for internal purpose.

Usage

Player chat is expected to be self contained within the internal Chatbox. For logging purpose, you are expected to be able to call Client_AddChatData to log in data for a player with a particular style and category.