Multiplayer | Discussion on client-server model and game instance design

TwelchDev
Sun, 16 Jul 2023 14:48:41 +0000
Multiplayer & Networking

Hello everyone,

I wanted to start a discussion about UE5 and creating dedicated servers, primarily focused around running multiple dedicated servers and integrating game instances for handling large player counts.

I have looked through endless Google searches to try and find out information on how this would be achieved with UE but a lot of the articles simply don’t speak of this, or only suggest a small section of that design. I even search academic material on Udemy to see if anyone had created tutorials on this but surprisingly no material about client-server setups with multiple servers.

To give background on the question, I have been looking to see if it’s possible to create a MMORPG using UE5. In this current day and age there are countless games out there that achieve this using megaservers. However, it’s not clear if you can achieve this same architecture with UE5 or if this is the correct tool for the job.

In terms of Game Instances, I was not looking for a single dedicated server to support 1000’s of players so in theory I thought the concept of game instances (100-250 players) would be more feasible and using scalable services to deploy multiple dedicated servers as required running game instances.

I want to keep this discussion completely theoretical and keep out the technical side as it could get complex, and to simply outline how this would be achieved.

The sub-questions I wanted to raise to the community are the following:

How would you handle communication between multiple dedicated servers?

What scalable services would you use (self-hosted /AWS/GC)

How would you handle redundancy? (server-down)

How would you handle persistent data (storing player data regardless of game instances)

I appreciate anyone in advance on giving there input on this discussion and I hope it can be useful material for the whole of the community to give them the answers their looking for.

9 posts - 6 participants