Currently, Fortnite is restricted to 100 players per lobby in the free-to-play title's Battle Royale mode. According to Sweeney, this is down to server limitations that were in place when the company released Fortnite back in 2017. But technology has come a long way since then, and so has Epic Games' Unreal Engine.
"We couldn't make 200 players work on a server [at the time]," Sweeney said. He would go on to explain that computers in the data centers "were just too slow" and that is the reason for Fortnite being "divided into a huge number of different islands."
Sweeney went on to explain: "We don't yet have the entire technology stack needed to robustly enable every creator to put their content together into a big, seamless open world if they wanted. And so a lot of the things you see in there are not the permanent end state of what we see this medium being, but are just current crutches that we're using to hobble by as we work towards the ultimate capabilities of the thing."
The CEO then discussed the "significant changes" that the studio expects as they continue to develop and upgrade the Unreal Engine, stating that the networking model (which Sweeney says is currently extremely limited) is one of the things that Epic intends to focus on. "If you look at what's in Unreal Engine 5 today, it's remarkably similar to the networking model I built for Unreal Engine 1 in 1997. It shipped in Unreal and Unreal Tournament, and it's been incrementally improved ever since without dramatically upending it."
According to Sweeney, the main problem with the engine's current network model is that it "doesn't enable [Epic's] servers to talk to each other." This means that while there might be 10 million concurrent players online all at once, they're in their "own separate shared copies of the world," according to Sweeney, and cannot see each other in that space.
It was then hinted at by Sweeney that this is something Epic Games wants to change with Unreal Engine 6, thus potentially allowing for an increase in players per lobby.
"So one of the big efforts that we're making for Unreal Engine 6 is improving the networking model, where we both have servers supporting lots of players, but also the ability to seamlessly move players between servers and to enable all the servers in a data center or in multiple data centers, to talk to each other and coordinate a simulation of the scale of millions or in the future, perhaps even a billion concurrent players."
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Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/fortnite-200-player-lobbies-with-unreal-engine-6/
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