Overview
This release number 2.2.0.20210501 affects plugins on the unreal engine version of 4.25 and 4.26. This update brings the first of a few improvements towards animation support and overall system fidelity.
The first step towards that goal is to improve the visual process of mounting and dismounting animations and discover how to make them as seamless as possible. The currently supplied Animations are hand built and done so swiftly to give a general idea of how to build the mounting animations. Because of this they have a few obvious issues with them that that can be overcome with a good development team and solid animation work. Not everyone has these resources available, and though the system works well this can be a barrier to some trying to work with it. While a demonstration of the work is not ready yet, there will be improvements to come and this update is one step towards a more perfect system for mounting, dismounting, and seat management for animals and vehicles in your game.
The latest improvements come from ensuring all design paths for the mounting system work with net relevancy.
The image above demonstrates what net relevancy is and how it works. The two characters have a small net relevancy, when a mounted character rides in to relevancy of another player we want that character to appear mounted on the horse and everything properly setup for them so when they do mounting actions (mount, dismount, seat changes) no strange side effects occur such as falling through the world.
Originally this worked fine so long as you had a mounting flow that involved playing animations, moving the character into position, or both. However if your system simply needed the player to attach to the mount and did not use positioning or animations then in a networked game this would not work. A lot of time and effort went into ensuring that all paths and design choices for mounting work properly in networked games. The solution was to switch to a pure property replication strategy rather than a hybrid approach with unreliable multicasts backed up by property replication to make sure characters where mounted. The hybrid approach worked but it was messy, convoluted, and confusing to debug. The new approach is cleaner, more reliable, and more importantly maintainable in future development.
Now the PNMS support for single player, multiplayer, and large multiplayer world games is stronger than ever and the new animation support will make it easier to customize how your game handles mounting.