WHAT
GDC 2019 is over and we’re back at Epic HQ, ready to bring you another Unreal Engine livestream! With the announcement of Epic MegaGrants, our new physics engine Chaos, ray tracing and our new audio mixer, there’s a lot to discuss. Aaron McLeran and Juan Canada are joining us to talk about what they’ve been working on and what the future holds.
We’ll be focusing on Q&A, so prepare your questions!
So as a Gamesparks user I have to say that their system was basically pretty straight forward, through the implementation of the script CloudCode and a NoSQL database. Even though they revamped this with something similar last year, I still use the original approach. There are Events you can call which contain variables which function as a key to access certain PlayerData. The major limitation however is that they do not make use of the UnrealEngine netcode, resulting in a tedious task to map all the UE netcode to CloudCode. This was the major barrier at the time and resulted to put my multiplayer game on hold, and switch to the development to a singleplayer game I always planned to make anyway.
So, hopefully the EPIC cloud storage approach has something similar easily to setup, and with the netcode layer already embedded.
In my opinion you do not have to setup lots of premade server side themes (leaderboard, currencies, achievements etc), because once you have the player data, you could maintain a listing of the top 1000 players for example, sorted by score. Or maybe this is better to have setup, not sure, probably depends on the player amount access rate. Also it should be easily understandable how to store and access nested entries, so that you do not have to pull the entire PlayerData each time, rather setup different db entries for each specification, such as inventoryItems, quests, playerCharacters. playerAchievements.
And any implementation should have working examples setup, to help streamline the process of adopting this new cloud solution.
Also I read that many of the original Gamesparks devs no longer work there…
Looking forward to test the EPIC cloud data layer!
in the sequencer control rig… will i be able to make an anim adjustment within an anim?.. say someone is walking down a path, and their foot goes thru a rock… can i lift the foot over the rock and continue within the same ‘walking’ anim, or would i have to make a whole new anim and place it at that spot… i know, i’m not quite awake yet (smile)
