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.