I’m a backer for a MMO project which runs on UE4, and ran into a possible issue which I’m eager to prove in-engine.
The scenario is like this: I want to put together a small 300m by 300m world and a standard player model from Paragon in the middle of it while it is connected to a dedicated server. I want to create a player ability to expand from a normal 2m height to a 40m height with similar proportions, then measure how it affects client and server side performance.
The hypothesis is meant to check if using such extreme size increasing mechanics could cause performance degradation on the client or server to prevent future attempts at griefing.
So far, I have set up a servicable map and one player character model from Paragon. But I got stuck at:
Creating the ability for the player character to expand to 40m height and go back again.
How to slap a dedicated server together which allows me to monitor server fps
Tried looking through any guides I could find and I’m completely cross-eyed when I read through the documentation. If anyone could point me to a moron’s guide at putting those two things together, I will be eternally grateful.
I don’t even need to do such test to know that it won’t affect performance the way you think it would and I will explain you why:
The way you suggest to change the character height is nothing more than to change its scale, what we call transformation for scale is already being calculated for every object in the scene and in this case the scale is 1, therefore whatever size it is will be multiplied by a scale of 1, so if you double that scale, the time spent for the multiplication was already there, and no mater if the scale is 1, 2 or 1000000, the amount of time spent on the multiplication is the same. As for the server side of things, all objects are known, their scale also, and the only date which changes, in this case, the scale, is the only data that will be sent to the client.
Supposing you scale the character for a size that it completely covers the terrain at the view frustum, you will have the terrain occluded and therefore you will have even less impact in the scene, since it doesn’t need to be drawn.
Another thing is what you are calling server fps, if it is dedicated means it does not have a screen, so no fps… maybe you meant another thing?