I myself am not a programmer or game developer but I have been working with people to make small educational games for kids. I have created a few but am stuck on this question. I exported a game and with gzip on a server I have the file size down to 75MB. When testing it still takes a long time to load and I approached a game developer and was told that was a good size for a game. I asked if it was possible to get games down to close to 20MB but he said that is impossible with Unreal Engine 4.
So after all that here is the question I really need to know. Can you make an HTML 5 game with unreal engine and have it run on a server without huge load times? I know I can try to size my game down even further but I do not want to continue my course of making games with Unreal 4 if it is not possible for them to run on servers.
If anybody else has made games that can be run on the web how do you do it? Is there really ways to get the file size down or are there setups on servers you can do to make the game load fast. I am not a big gamer myself but my friends play tons of online games that are all hosted online and they have to have bigger file sizes than mine so how do they do it?
Any input would be great as I make this tough decision to continue or not. (please note I really love the Unreal engine and I do not want to give it up if there is a small it will work with html5)
That does seem to take a long time to download and play. It would probably be possible to optimize the assets so that they’re a lot smaller, if you wanted to try that.
I have tried that but after talking with quite a few game developers I am realizing that UE4 is not ready for that and it makes sense. All other math games I see are simple javascript games that are good but not near as fun for kids as first person math games. There are a few of them out there but not many and they are usually full downloads. I was trying to avoid that because I wanted to have schools go through my websites.
The other option I am thinking of is kind of crazy but here goes… I thought of maybe making an online multiplayer game that has different levels that you can choose and each level is a mini game. Doing it this way might work because there is a big download for the school but after that it is run through a link or app through my website. This is an idea I am researching.
Games are fun and nice but are just an extra as I make animated math videos for schools and that is my selling point but kids really like math games so I thought I would give it my best shot.
Hello, i’m not a game developer as well, but maybe i can give you an idea.
You can provide at your website, the game installer, and use some kind of web plugin, to use your website to start the game.
There was a game called Battlefield Heroes by Easy (probably the better game they made so far but its closed now). To play it, you need to log in on their website and click the play button to start the game.
This way the schools can register and use your website to download the game and also to start it.
I believe this way the server load is the same as a normal online game and you are not limited at small games.
Thank you so much for your input. I wish I had seen your comment earlier.
I think that is the best way to go for me. I am looking into how to build the level and will have to pay people to do different parts for me as well. The download will probably be large like 2gb but the kids will love it more this way I think. Thanks
I just loaded your game, it took less than a minute on my machine to load up. It also is responding rather quickly for me. I’m working on Chrome currently. I’m sure you’ve probably already looked over this information however, here are some documents that may be helpful with developing your HTML5 project.
Hopefully the information within these two links will help you make any changes to your game that you need to.
When it comes to servers, there is a web server which is HTML5 and then there is a networking server which is used to create multiplayer games. However, if you’re worried about the large loading times, this is basically due to the size of the game and your internet and hosting speed. You may want to search around on the internet and see which speed is the best for what you need for instance, Amazon S3 is pretty fast but it all depends on what you need it for. Although, we’re planning to implement in 4.9 an added option to directly upload to Amazon S3 during the packaging process. Please keep in mind that this new feature may not be added in 4.9 and may be pushed back however for now, we’re planning on implementing that.
“I asked if it was possible to get games down to close to 20MB but he said that is impossible with Unreal Engine 4.” IMHO - TappyChicken is actually ~15mb.
Also, TBH, you use case is the what we think is a great use case for HTML5 builds. Small games.
Regarding Load Times - there are many things you can do eg download a small level first and start downloading other levels behind the scenes. Also, you can set up caching so that the next time you play, the game is instant because there’s nothing to download and everything has been locally cached.