Amazon GameLift Plugin for Unreal Engine

Compatible with Unreal Engine 5 (versions 5.0, 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3).

Overview

Amazon GameLift is a fully managed service that allows game developers to manage and scale dedicated game servers for session-based multiplayer games. The Amazon GameLift plugin for Unreal Engine provides tools that makes setting up your Unreal project, compatible with UE 5.0, 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3, for hosting on Amazon GameLift quicker and easier. Once installed, you will be able to search the plugin from within the Unreal Engine editor and start using it to integrate Amazon GameLift functionality into your client and server code. The plugin contains functionality to automatically bootstrap your game runtime environment to the AWS Cloud, fully test your game server integration with Amazon GameLift locally, and deploy your game servers on Amazon GameLift.

You can use the following built-in templates to deploy your game for some of the common scenarios.

• Single-region fleet: Deploy your game server to one fleet in a single AWS Region. Use this scenario to experiment with your install scripts and runtime deployment, as well as your integration.
• FlexMatch fleet: Deploy your game server for hosting with a FlexMatch matchmaking solution. Amazon GameLift's FlexMatch is a highly scalable and customizable matchmaking service for multiplayer games. Use this scenario to set up basic matchmaking components (including a rule set) that you can customize.

Each scenario uses an AWS CloudFormation template to deploy your game, creating a stack with the necessary resources. You can view and manage your resource stacks in the AWS Management Console for CloudFormation.

• Prerequisites
• Install the plugin
• Amazon GameLift resources

Prerequisites

• Amazon GameLift plugin for Unreal download package. Download a zip file from the GitHub Releases page. Or clone the plugin from the Github repo.
• If you cloned the repo you will also need to download the following items from Amazon GameLift's Getting Started. Otherwise, if you downloaded the zip file from the GitHub Releases page, you can skip this step.
  • C++ Server SDK Plugin for Unreal
  • C++ Server SDK
• If you cloned the repo instead of downloading the zip from the GitHub Releases page, copy the source code for C++ Server SDK Plugin for Unreal into the folder amazon-gamelift-plugin-unreal-release-<version>/amazon-gamelift-plugin-unreal/GameLiftPlugin/Source/GameLiftServer/. The REPLACEME.md inside the directory details what the file structure should look like. Delete the GameLiftServerSDK.uplugin from the same directory. Then make the following code change to amazon-gamelift-plugin-unreal/GameLiftPlugin/Source/GameLiftServer/Source/GameLiftServerSDK/Private/GameLiftServerSDK.cpp. Change line 28 and 29 from

FString BaseDir = IPluginManager::Get().FindPlugin("GameLiftServerSDK")->GetBaseDir();
const FString SDKDir = FPaths::Combine(*BaseDir, TEXT("ThirdParty"), TEXT("GameLiftServerSDK"));

        to

FString BaseDir = IPluginManager::Get().FindPlugin("GameLiftPlugin")->GetBaseDir();
const FString SDKDir = FPaths::Combine(*BaseDir, TEXT("Source"), TEXT("GameLiftServer"), TEXT("ThirdParty"), TEXT("GameLiftServerSDK"));

        If you downloaded the zip file from the GitHub Releases page, you can skip this step.

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 or newer.
• A source-built version of the Unreal Engine editor. Required to develop server build components for a multiplayer game. See the Unreal Engine documentation:
  • Accessing Unreal Engine source code on GitHub. Requires GitHub and Epic Games accounts.
  • Building Unreal Engine from Source
• (Optional) A C++ multiplayer game project with game code. Projects that use Blueprints only are not compatible with this plugin, at this time.
• An AWS account with access permissions to use AWS GameLift. See Set up programmatic access with long-term credentials.

Install the plugin

Complete the following steps to install and enable the plugin for your multiplayer game project. For more details, see the AWS GameLift documentation.

1. Build the Amazon GameLift C++ Server SDK. See section below for details.

2. Install and enable the plugin.

   1. In your game project root folder, create a folder called "Plugins" and copy the "GameLiftPlugin" folder located inside the downloaded Amazon GameLift plugin into this new folder.

   2. In the .uproject file, add the following to the Plugins section:

      {
          "Name": "GameLiftPlugin",
          "Enabled": true
      },
      {
          "Name": "WebBrowserWidget",
          "Enabled": true
      }
      

3. Set your project to use the source-built UE editor. Do this step if your game project was created with a non-source-built version of UE. In your game project folder, select the .uproject file and choose the option Switch Unreal Engine Version.

4. Rebuild the project solution. After completing the previous steps to update your project files, rebuild the solution. Note: if you get an error for not finding header files in the C++ Server SDK similar to fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'aws/gamelift/server/model/DescribePlayerSessionsResult.h': No such file or directory when building the project, or get a path too long warning when unzipping the files in the release bundle, try moving the plugin to a folder closer to the root, or rename the destination folder to a shorter name and extract the files again. Sometimes zip tools might silently skip files due to file path being too long.

Build the Amazon GameLift C++ Server SDK

Before you can use the plugin inside an Unreal game, you need to build the Amazon GameLift server C++ SDK.

To build the Amazon GameLift server SDK:

1. Open a terminal/command prompt.
2. Navigate to the GameLift-Cpp-ServerSDK-<version> folder that was included with the Amazon GameLift SDK Release download.
3. Follow the below instructions for your platform.

Linux

For a quick and easy automated build for Amazon Linux compatible binaries and OpenSSL and OpenCrypto dependencies, see the Building the Amazon GameLift Server SDK for Unreal Engine 5 on Amazon Linux.

If you want to do this manually instead, follow the steps below. This expects you have the correct OpenSSL version that matches your Unreal Engine configured in your Linux environment, and the OpenSSL and OpenCrypto libraries copied to your server build.

1. Run the following commands

   mkdir out
   cd out
   cmake -DBUILD_FOR_UNREAL=1 ..
   make

2. Once complete, the following file should have been built

   prefix/lib/aws-cpp-sdk-gamelift-server.so
   

3. Copy the file over to the following location in the Unreal plugin folder:

   GameLiftPlugin/Source/GameLiftServer/ThirdParty/GameLiftServerSDK/Linux/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/
   

   Once complete you should have a filepath similar to this example

   GameLiftPlugin/Source/GameLiftServer/ThirdParty/GameLiftServerSDK/Linux/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/aws-cpp-sdk-gamelift-server.so 
   

Windows

1. Run the following commands

   mkdir out
   cd out
   cmake -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -DBUILD_FOR_UNREAL=1 ..
   msbuild ALL_BUILD.vcxproj /p:Configuration=Release

2. The above step produces the following binary files required by the plugin.

   prefix\bin\aws-cpp-sdk-gamelift-server.dll  
   prefix\lib\aws-cpp-sdk-gamelift-server.lib
   

3. Copy the files over to this location in the Unreal plugin folder:

   GameLiftPlugin\Source\GameLiftServer\ThirdParty\GameLiftServerSDK\Win64\
   

   Once complete you should have two filepaths similar to this example

   GameLiftPlugin\Source\GameLiftServer\ThirdParty\GameLiftServerSDK\Win64\aws-cpp-sdk-gamelift-server.dll  
   GameLiftPlugin\Source\GameLiftServer\ThirdParty\GameLiftServerSDK\Win64\aws-cpp-sdk-gamelift-server.lib 
   

For more detailed instructions on how to build the C++ SDK,, please refer to the README.md file located in the C++ SDK directory.

Amazon GameLift Resources

• About Amazon GameLift
• Amazon GameLift documentation
• AWS Game Tech forum
• AWS for Games blog
• Contributing guidelines