So, I recently heard of a new game engine called Nitrous Engine by a company called Oxide Games. A really cool tech demo can be seen here: Star Swarm Tech Demo - (Next Gen Space RTS Engine, Think Sins of a Solar Empire but Bigger) - YouTube where there are 10000 AI controlled ships fighting each other. Its pretty amazing. I was wondering how the Unreal Engine compares, if you wanted to make a similarly large fight scene happen in a UE4 powered space game?
I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t do this in UE4 - you’ll need to make sure that you’re using smart LODs - most of those ships are tiny while on screen, so making them LOD out to a billboard would be smart.
Using instance rendering to cut memory would also be a good idea.
As far as the AI goes, using a swarm flocking algorithm for the movement and updating it all in one go would be the best idea.
I saw that demo (or rather an older version of it) a few months back. It just looks like a lot of mesh instancing and is nothing special at all.
I want to say one of the key differences is that Oxide uses Mantle as it’s rendering API where UE4 uses OpenGL. Correct me if I’m wrong though.
UE4 actually uses D3D11 as the main renderer on Windows and OpenGL on Linux/Mac/etc. But OpenGL can be used instead for Windows as well.