Conan Exiles is using Unreal Engine, but it has horrible multiplayer performance.
Is it using Unreal Engine’s multiplayer solution? Unreal Engine is the same as Unreal Tournament right? Unreal Tournament has excellent network performance.
I’m confused.
UE4 is an engine. It’s a tool. Like a paintbrush.
People take that tool and use it. Some people can create some really good paintings with a paintbrush. And some can’t.
So just because a game using UE4 has bad networking performance, that doesn’t mean anything about UE4. It just means the dev of that game has not spent time with optimizing performance, or he just doesn’t know how to do it correctly.
Unreal Tournament is made by people who absolutely know how to use this tool, so it will also have excellent network performance.
That being said, they also did claim that they were rolling their own networking solution.
I would say it’s much less problem with networking specifically and much more with game code. For this scale of game as Ark or Conan (even though they are not that big), fact that UObject can only be single threaded is serious limitation to performance.
I believe you have not:
1 - Played Unreal Tournament and another supposedly AAA shooter during the same period (side by side; i.e. CoD/CS:GO/BF1/etc) to make an objective comparison and form an objective opinion about UT’s network performance.
2 - Contributed to the UT project in a meaningful enough way to receive blank and/or unprofessional and/or irrational responses from its developers (in any way actually, ranging from suggestions to fully fleshed out mods which proved various points and showcased various holes in development).
3 - Followed the way things have been designed and implemented in UT (at least in the last 1.5-2 years, if not even from the beginning) to observe the lack of knowledge and/or care said features have been implemented with. (Note: I’m not referring to character movement mechanics or animations or whatever icing on the cake the game has, I’m referring to features which are supposed to be part of the core, such as network prediction <example: they have their own prediction system built on top of UE’s built-in one; literally predicting the predictions>, server-client architecture <look at the way hubs and servers are written; it’s all public, after all> etc.)
There are a few such stories related to UE4 in general, like the above posters mentioned it could be anything. But then again I also understand that we can wonder if this had technical issues related with the engine core, mostly perhaps because its a new engine and it has been getting updates every other month which can also break backward compatibility, workflow etc. especially in larger teams as well as many other things. This is regardless if you have a solid team of programmers or not.
The team can go so far without resorting to direct technical support from Epic through a a private deal perhaps, and the folks at Epic can also go so far given the fact that the engine is being constantly built from ground up.
One recent story was Microsoft’s cancellation of Scalebound, some claiming (technical problems with engine) this case UE4, personally I wouldn’t be surprised all that much given the current circumstances and rapid changes happening in the engine. If you ask me it may have been a risky choice going on such a big production early on with a brand new (non in house) engine unless they had certain guarantees, but no one can really give those. Maybe the timing wasn’t right or could be any number of other things.
they have ALOT of replication going on, look at the mod kit their project is a friggen mess. no cleaver solutions just hard replication for everything.
Someone on another thread was arguing that today’s Internet “can handle it”…
People with said mindset do game networks like that then you see those games perform the way they do 