hey guys, i was wondering does unreal engine have the capability of having unit population capacity that could hold 500 units or 1000 units or more in a RTS Project?
I was thinking of making a RTS game similar to Command and Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars or RUSE. there been alot of games that looked like there only doing is Unit Limit Caps because of Performance issues but C&C 3 didnt have any when i played it, i could be wrong.
I know some games used Custom engines to make that happen, do i also need a custom Engine to do that or make custom Engine and Merge it with Unreal? i would like feedback if you can.
but i would like your advice on how to make a RTS game in Unreal engine with the capacity to build 500 units or 1000 units/Characters Per Faction (Player Vs AI) (Player vs Player) on a Map level without Bad performance such low Framerate/FPS that causes lag. that would be very Helpful.
Unreal isn’t really suited out of the box for large scale rts’s.
Some people try to get around it’s limitations with hierarchical instanced static meshes for units.
The ai and path-finding is usually calculated on a custom second thread (you would probably need to program your own flowfield for unit traversal)
As for ai that’s a whole topic on it’s own. You can forget about behavior trees at that scale and using unreal’s built in ai systems.
Collision detection on HISMs is also simplified so you would also need to calculate HISM x HISM collisions.
As for networking Unreals solution is catered towards mid size fps games so with 500 units you will starve your network connection leading to dropped packets. A lockstep solution would probably be a better solution for larger groups of units. (again you need to write custom tech at this point)
If you want a skirmish 2 x 2 for example that’s 4000 unit’s. Totally not possible with unreal’s network based on replication. You would need to make unit movement / reaction totally deterministic and then pass commands to a queue and execute them via an internal lockstep function and then distribute this to players with a timestamp and execute the commands in order.