Neworking without dedicated servers, Unity3D or Unreal Engine 4 ?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hello,
I’m currentely designing a multiplayer game (4 to 8 players game) and I have a technical question.

As an Indie, I can’t afford dedicated servers and I don’t want players to pay a server for a 5-10$ game so there is my question:

Which Engine is best to make a game where players host the game (and plays at the same time) ?
Unity3D or Unreal Engine 4 ? With Unity I read that the vanilla unity networking is not very good so people use “photon” but photon doesn’t allow clientside servers (listen servers I believe it’s called) (or it’s expensive) so there’s also “Bolt” but it costs 65$ (I’m a student, 65$ is a lot) (maybe it’s the solution to use). Unreal Engine 4 (I’m a student so it’s free) seams fine for the networking I need but I’m making a 2D pixel art game so it’s maybe a bit much to use this powerful engine not really designed for this kinf of simplegame.

Thank you for your answers,
.

P.S: sorry for my english, I’m french.

2

when it comes to networking UE4 makes it fairly easy to get going with networking thanks to blueprints and the fact that most of what you want is already there

tho if your worried about the engine being too much for your type of game i would not dwell on it to much. it likes if someone pondered why they drive a bugatti to the store instead of a minivan, point is to use what your more comfortable with :slight_smile:

4

Thank you for your answers, I’m going to test this tutorial and send the compiled client to a friend to test on the network how it’s working.
So with UE4, players will be able, with the click of an in-game button, to host the game for 4 friends ? (Without the need to open ports on the router ?)

Thanks

5

Hey ,

No it won’t automagically work unfortunately. You do need to make sure that the host has the right ports forwarded. There is no native NAT punchthrough that I know of.

I do know that Steam will take care of matchmaking and NAT punchthrough stuff, but you will have to set steamworks up first, which also is not the easiest things to do in my experience.

Good luck!

6

Ok, I’ll do some research about steamwork thanks !