Over 9000? What is the current forecasted client connection limit?

General Feedback & Requests
1

I’ve posted this on UT forum and AnswerHub, but I’ll ask here too as I am not sure where I should be asking…

Curious of the following:

  • how many concurrent connections a server will be able to support
  • whether load balancing across multiple servers is in the works

It was a question in today’s twitch that didn’t get addressed. I think they asked for support for like 10000 players etc…

Planetside 2 supports 400+ players in a single map.

I recall seeing some Minecraft servers support 10k+ users, although I haven’t seen that many in a single map…but I have seen twitch streams with a lot of players present.

I’d like to be able to make an MMO with UT4/UE4.

One response on thread from lrjaco:

Another response from RattleSN4K3:

2

As far as Unreal is concerned, I believe the only limit is the amount of Player Indices it supports. If that is a 32-bit Int, you can have a maximum of 2,147,483,647 - Just under a third of the worlds total population. I suspect however it has a more sensible cap on it somewhere, or it’s more likely to be 16 or even 8 bits.

Hardware wise that’s never going to happen. Someone with a deeper understanding of the netcode should be able to help you figure out the software limits. Rama is likely a good bet or has that info!

Also you might already know this so forgive me if it sounds condescending in anyway, but PlanetSide 2 supports that many members because it has full-time dedicated servers. A player-hosted game could never reliably host that many connections all at once. You’ll probably have to get yourself such a server to test those kinds of figures.

3

Regarding the load balancing, I believe it’s something that needs to be done outside of the engine itself. It’s too late to load balance when the client is already connected to the server instance.
The theoretical number of max connections is not an issue here, because you will encounter hardware and later operating system limitations before you could encounter any engine limitations.
The real number of max connections would depend on complexity of your game logic and your hardware specs. The only way to find out is to simulate it yourself on the hardware you’re going to use for the dedicated server.