We’ve got something special lined up for this week’s Epic for Indies session. Join us this Wednesday for an exclusive live Q&A with Rich Eastwood, a seasoned game developer with over 25 years of experience working on legendary titles like Unreal Tournament 99, Medal of Honor, Battlefield, Doom Eternal, and Fortnite.
Rich is currently part of a small strike team at Epic, where he’s been creating Ballistic—a project developed in just three months with a tiny but incredibly talented crew. His expertise spans multiplayer and single-player games, FPS and third-person genres, with a focus on level layout, composition, and collaborative design.
Got Questions?
This is your chance to learn directly from Rich about his journey, how he approaches game design across genres, and what it’s like to work on groundbreaking games with world-class teams.
Post your questions below!
We’ll select some to be answered live during the session, and Rich will also take additional questions on the spot.
Whether you’re an aspiring indie dev, a UEFN creator or a seasoned developer looking to level up, don’t miss this opportunity to connect with one of the industry’s most experienced designers.
Interested! my use-case is with simulated bodies under player control (they add forces) and using async physics.
Please pass that on to Rich Eastwood and the team, if they’re interested in touching on this commonly requested indie approach.
The physics are using Unreal’s own async physics thread. This is like a much simpler version of chaos vehicles but with an indie-scope, more like box karts as this is a much more indie-friendly workload.
So I apply forces in the async loop, and so do other players for their little karts.
As Epic mentioned async physics really simplifies networking, I’d love to know more! that part is completely missing from the learning materials.
I’d love to know how to network these async simulated bodies, as part of the rationale for choosing Epic’s new async physics was that the server tick could be the same?
I thirst for knowledge.
Thank you for passing this on and thanks to Rich and the team.
Edit: hoping there will be a text up online later as I don’t have discord.
I would love to get a deep dive into the level design for fortnite ballistic. In games like ballistic, counter strike, valorant and others it would be very interesting to hear more about the creation process. How were sightlines, obstacle, room layout and connecting paths created. What were essential metrics for the design. What specific approaches or tools were used to create the map? Shooters stand and fall with level design and we all have some beloved famous maps we love to play on. I would really appreciate deep insights into that.
As an educator leading a collaborative Team Level Creation course at the collegiate level, if my students express a desire to design their own playable multiplayer demo, how should I structure my lectures to effectively guide them toward achieving a project that aligns with their skill level?
I have easily purchased a handful of post processing packs (some have Xray) but none work due to mobile devices, the image added shows you have a similar effect where there is an outline around team mates and we can see them through objects / walls.
Any chance you can get EPIC to include this with the Post Processing effects (we have not had any new ones in a long time)
Also Ballistic is 1st Person view only which is a brave decision, did you ever have the discussion on allowing an option to choose either 1st or 3rd person view point?
Do you have a set number of maps or length of time which Ballistic will be pushed, will it include vehicles or is this always going to be short maps on foot and reference the mode will it always be a bomb planting / defusing for Ballistic or will it cover other modes such as the rumored Extraction mode that has been thrown around.
Last one - I did not like the map on my 1st impressions but looking around it is really well put together in all areas so layout, choice of assets - mini map / UI etc you did a good job
Is the pack specifically made for this map or was it a purchase from the EPIC Store?
The actual weapon choice system and way weapons are earned, the swapping of sides and map stats + ranking up is very nice - this is a luxury us creators do not have - would be very nice to get to use those already made and working tools especially as if there was an error EPIC would surely fix things, personally I would like to see an agreement between the creators and company that we get to use their system for a slice of any revenue a map might make.
I have launched several vehicle games, including a mobile game called DRAFTYCAR and it’s a bunch of cars traveling down a straight line track at about 200mph. It has 100K installs! For now, it’s a single player experience, but I want to make it multiplayer on both PC and mobile.
Will Unreal’s recent enhancements (resimulation and prediction) be applicable to my game, or multiplayer vehicle games in general?
[QUESTION] What is the best architectural approach to have specialized services that send/receive messages from the server (and for the server to send messages to other clients)? Something like an InventoryService that receives a new payload from the server saying the player has a new item.
Initially I thought subsystems were meant for that, but then I learned they don’t make RPC calls, and the only way to make them do it is by having them create an Actor just for this, which seems kinda hacky.
[QUESTION] In a game that uses a persistent map with sublevels on it, what would be the recommended way of handling entering buildings? I know that LoadStreamLevel is replicated when called on the server but you can’t (AFAIK) manipulate the level transform to make it spawn at a dynamic location within your persistent level. In the other hand you have CreateLevelinstance which lets you manipulate the level transform at runtime but isn’t replicated. How would you handle a session with two players where one of them enters a building that should be loaded as a sub-level and make sure that, when the other player enters the same building they will see the same replicated sub-level?
Hello!
[CONTEXT]
Our team is creating a prototype that has MOBA-like qualities - that has both PvE and PvP aspects - with the Gameplay Ability System as our underlying mechanics / stats system. Our multiplyer connection plan is to be P2P, not Dedicated Server.
[QUESTION]
Are there any patriculars to be aware of when it comes to high intensity moment-to-moment isometric gameplay? We didn’t start with the Lyra template, but we do have somthing working - should we consider migrating it, or keep going as we are?
[Question]
Did you use GAS [Gameplay Ability System] in one of your FPS projects or would you consider it?
If so, how would you integrate it into the multiplayer FPS genre - what do you consider as abilities, effects and attributes? and how do you deal with lag compensation, namely, Server Side Rewind and Client Side Prediction in this framework in the FPS genre?
In order to create multiplayer game, with abilities like the ones in fortnite’s recent marvel season or air bender themed abilities - what are the best practices and blind spots when working with the UE5 GAS?
(Particularly as a very basically technically skilled designer, that needs to know what requirements and challenges a programmer will likely run into from your experience)
Can Epic provide some boilerplate resimulation code for setting up a basic ball static mesh?
There’s very few examples online and none that fully implement both state and input.
I’m very keen and have been bashing my head against it for over a month trying to figure it out!
Edit 2 : I am not sure if this was the right place to ask these questions. Feel free to ignore them if not :d
Edit 3 : yeah wasn’t the right place
[Question 1] What is the best way to handle dropped packages in replication calls such as multicasts? It made sense for me to loop certain failed replication calls to fix them.
(ex: Server Multicasts an item → Client receives but the item is not ready for client sync so clients asks server again with some delay → Server Receives the request and tries again)
However when the ping is high or something happens on client side and the game frozes, the multicast package is dropped all you see is an uninitialized/unsynchronized item, since the client didn’t even received that multicast.
Do I need to also manually check that client received the multicast successfully or should I have a looping function on client side unsynchronized actors on the map that keeps requesting to be synced. I am kind of lost on how to handle unsuccessful network calls, how to make a healthy network connection with high ping/loss clients.
[Question 2] How do we need to handle the replicated actors when a player joins to the game in the middle of session? Lets say you have a BaseGun actor initialized with GunDataAsset. We want to synchronize the gun for newly joined player with specific gunDataAsset. How one should approach this problem?
Currently I’ve a system like this:
→ Client joins the session and calls Beginplay() of actor A (type of ABaseGun)
→ Begin play of actor A request synchronization through local player controller
→ On Server player controller receives sync request of actor A an calls client call with specific Gun Data Asset.
→ On Client player controller receives the Specific Gun Data Asset and initializes Actor A. If it fails to initialize it requests again.
This systems seems to work but feels like I’m doing something wrong. How does AAA studios/Industry handle the replication system in their games, is there a standard approach?
Thank you for your time!
Edit: I’m mainly working on 4.27.2. But I also tinker with newest unreal version for hobby projects.
Got Questions?
Post your questions below!
Wednesday 29th
Time: 3PM EST
Live on the Epic for Indies DISCORD
