Unreal Engine Livestream - GDC 2019 Postshow - March 28 - Live from HQ

[unit23]

@franktech

@VictorLerp

Wow! So many great announcements they kind of overshadow the acquisition of SkookumScript etc. But in the stream, any chance you could also cover Epic’s plans for new coding options within the engine now that development has ceased on SkookumScript. My wish would be for Blueprints to see expansion into ‘text form’ (for code auditing etc), rather than yet another scripting language or bundling a pre-existing one. But either way, here’s hoping the new shinny is completely built into the engine (as Unrealscript was, and not just yet another external 3rd-Party install requiring separate pay-for IntelliSense too). Cheers!

TimSweeneyEpic
Epic Staff
168 points·2 months ago
We’re discussing this a lot internally. We like the idea. We see the introduction of another programming layer as a decision that’s binding on everything we do for a decade or more so we are cautious about quick patchy decisions.

We like the simplicity of C# but we don’t like the impedance mismatch between C#'s containers and managed runtime and C++ data structures. This makes it tough to share data between the C# and C++ world. UnrealScript had a much more direct mapping between the two worlds, yet still the burden of mirroring data was significant.

We love the even greater simplicity of Python but see similar issues there and are wary of dynamic typing. Lua is nice too.

We are generally scared of JavaScript.

There is also the possibility of a custom language, as UnrealScript was, that’s carefully crafted to interoperate with the engine and solve game focused problems.

We welcome all of your thoughts.

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!