Comment by honkycat

5 years ago

I do indie game dev as a hobby, and I have taken multiple classes on networked multiplayer, and I've also implemented VERY SIMPLE proof of concepts for multiplayer fighting games in Unreal Engine.

I think what a lot of people are missing here is the context that there is STILL not a "make it multiplayer" button in game engines. They do NOT do most of the work for you for any facet of game development. Making games is still a ton of work.

To name a few things that Unreal Engine does not do for you: networked movement prediction, acceptable LERPing to positions when client/host disagree, anticheat... basically it has a nice client/server model API you can use. You can annotate structs to efficiently be transmitted over the internet, and query the API to see if you are "host" or "client".

There is an amazing talk on this from the Mortal Kombat creators about how long it took them to get their netcode right[0]. Now make that much harder when dealing with millions of players in one world, with mold-able terrain and an exotic networking stack.