Thing I know will work: set up UE4 editor on one machine (lots of memory, CPU, graphics card) and accessing it remotely from another machine (a low powered laptop). With VNC or other remote desktop solution, this is cake. The Host user and Client user are the same, this even works easily on Windows.
Situation: 1 single machine (Host), many users (Client).
I can set up a very high powered machine (ranging from multi-cpu server to a supercomputer multi-node system), that’s not the problem. The answer I haven’t been able to find: can multiple users access this system simultaneously? To make this easier the environment is not Windows and each user has their own UE4 login, as well as their own user login for the system.
They would VNC (or other remote desktop) tunnel to their own login and desktop on the server. Clients access data stored “locally” (in their home directories) while leveraging system resources from the Host. They are all using the UE4 editor, but for different purposes - and any collaboration is done through source control as if they were working on separate machines. Users would be doing a mix of programming and “level” editor/blueprint work.
I know Linux support is on the lower side, and Ubuntu is typically a single-user environment, much like OSX’s default setup. However both of these systems are built upon inherently multi-user environments, and support such set ups with relative ease. Is this possible on Mac and/or Linux? Assuming the system in question can support a single-user environment of UE4, does that mean it could support multiple concurrent users if the OS manages it (whether or not performance makes this a workable situation)?
Would this simply(!) require the specialized set-up (the OS on the Host) or would it also require modifications to the Engine? Would system resources get shared, or might UE4 prevent competition from itself?
The long-and-short question is: can UE4 support a single large investment in a powerful machine, accessed by a bunch of cheaper machines, or does it require (at this point) individual machines meeting the system requirements?