Any property on your entity can be networked (synced from server to client).

Making a property networked

Adding the [Net] attribute makes it networked.

Classes containing networked members have to be marked as partial in order to work properly. This is because codegen adds a supporting class in another file.

Predicted

The properties can also be predicted.

This changes two things

• The variable is backed up and restored properly by the prediction system
• You can change the value clientside

Local

You can make your networked property Local too, meaning it'll only be sent to the owner of the entity. This is useful if the data is only useful to the controlling client, or for anti-cheat reasons you wouldn't want other players to see the value.

Networkable Types

Custom Structs

If you want to transmit a struct it needs to be plain old data. It should contain no strings, no classes, no lists, no entities.

Either of the above are valid

NetworkComponent

By deriving a class from NetworkComponent you'll be able to sync that using [Net] too. It has a few characteristics that you should know about.

• You can derive from the class and it'll create the right class on the client.
• You can only send variables, entities and structs. No classes, no Lists.
• [Predicted] and [Local] attributes won't change anything, these things are dictated by the original [Net].

An example usage of NetworkComponent is to provide things like Camera. By networking a Camera class on a var, we allow the server to set the camera class directly and configure its variables. The server can set the Pawn.Camera to a new FirstPersonCamera and the client will receive that variable and create that class, like magic. This adds a lot of versatility to these kinds of systems.

Lists

Under the hood the List is converted to an ObservableList and returned as an IList. This means you might see some unexpected behaviours. Here's a list.

• It will never be null
• Setting it to null will just clear the list
• Setting it to another List will copy from the list
• • Further changes the original list won't apply to the Networked List
• Any extension methods that expect a List<T> type won't be recognised

Materials, Models

Resources such as Materials and Models are able to be replicated, with these conditions:

• Resource should already be precached on the client
• Loaded from disk (needs to be filename match)

Under the hood they're networked as a hash of the filename.

Custom Assets

Custom Assets (decals, surfaces, sounds) that are loaded from disk should be fully compatible.

Since they're lightweight, all Custom Assets are loaded from disk on startup, which makes networking them a lot simpler. Under the hood they use the exact same system as Materials and Models to transmit, but since they're all loaded already you shouldn't run into the same worries about precaching.