Unreal Engine 4 Player Count -> MMO

Hello everyone,
i was thinking a bit, the game engine itself says that the Player Limit is set to 64 and i kind of got bit disappointed.
But when you think a bit deeper, if UE4 has a limit set to 64 and Fortnite has 100 Players… hm? Why is that? Is it the engines fault or how should i understand it?
As far as i know all the “Loot, damage, health” thing is calculated by the Server and just passed to clients. Clients run the visual part of the game.

I guess UE4 has enough of “Graphic” and should focus more into Server efficiency right ?

It depends on the game, the source is available so you can make it do more if you really want to and can get good performance that way.

Connected players aren’t hard-coded anymore, that is outdated docs;

However every “MMO” out there made with Unreal 3 or 4 suffers performance issues (Tera, Blade & Soul, etc etc) because devs try to pullout WoW numbers without optimizations specific to the engine’s graphics code.

Lost Ark seems promising, apparently solving that issue, but the game is dungeon instances based.

UE4s netcode (performance, scalability) is really bad, avoid it all all costs for MMORPGs. Write your own server and expand it. For location/movement replication and simple interactions my own servercode from a PoC handles about 500 emulated users without remotely breaking a sweat (<5% CPU/1,5gb mem). UE4’s implementation would require a high performance server for only just a tenth of that :slight_smile:

Until your game has to simulate physics;
And deal with cheaters…

Then you’ll see why UE4 networking is the way it is.
(and waste a life implementing the same existing features into your custom server code)

Why would i replicated physics for MMOs when i can just caluclate them client-side for each instance? Also UE4 does almost nothing against cheaters, there are openly available tookits to compromise the engines networking, out of the box so to say.

As a consequence bigger games like ARK, Fortnite or PUBG use Battleye, (which only checks process injections for target processes and compares some hashes). That all doesnt take anything off from what i wrote - and once you get into it, its not that hard anymore to add all the custom stuff (I admit that it takes a bit of time tho).

If you want to do a MMO, thats the way to do it properly.

It depends, when it’s just a visual thing, they can be done client side indeed. But if it’s a crucial part of a game, like in Battlefield where a whole wall is gone it should be replicated. This is just what i think, not sure if it works this way. Just saying.