Throughout a brand new interview with Matthew Ball, Epic Video games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney hinted at the opportunity of 200-player Fortnite lobbies with the following iteration of the studio’s fashionable engine: Unreal Engine 6.
Presently, Fortnite is restricted to 100 gamers per foyer within the free-to-play title’s Battle Royale mode. In line with Sweeney, that is right down to server limitations that had been in place when the corporate launched Fortnite again in 2017. However expertise has come a good distance since then, and so has Epic Video games’ Unreal Engine.
“We could not make 200 gamers work on a server [at the time],” Sweeney mentioned. He would go on to clarify that computer systems within the information facilities “had been simply too gradual” and that’s for Fortnite being “divided into an enormous variety of totally different islands.”
Sweeney went on to clarify: “We do not but have the whole expertise stack wanted to robustly allow each creator to place their content material collectively into an enormous, seamless open world in the event that they wished. And so numerous the belongings you see in there usually are not the everlasting finish state of what we see this medium being, however are simply present crutches that we’re utilizing to hobble by as we work in direction of the last word capabilities of the factor.”
The CEO then mentioned the “vital adjustments” that the studio expects as they proceed to develop and improve the Unreal Engine, stating that the networking mannequin (which Sweeney says is presently extraordinarily restricted) is likely one of the issues that Epic intends to deal with. “In case you have a look at what’s in Unreal Engine 5 in the present day, it is remarkably much like the networking mannequin I constructed for Unreal Engine 1 in 1997. It shipped in Unreal and Unreal Match, and it has been incrementally improved ever since with out dramatically upending it.”
In line with Sweeney, the principle drawback with the engine’s present community mannequin is that it “would not allow [Epic’s] servers to speak to one another.” Which means that whereas there may be 10 million concurrent gamers on-line all of sudden, they’re of their “personal separate shared copies of the world,” based on Sweeney, and can’t see one another in that area.
It was then hinted at by Sweeney that that is one thing Epic Video games needs to vary with Unreal Engine 6, thus doubtlessly permitting for a rise in gamers per foyer.
“So one of many huge efforts that we’re making for Unreal Engine 6 is bettering the networking mannequin, the place we each have servers supporting a number of gamers, but in addition the power to seamlessly transfer gamers between servers and to allow all of the servers in an information heart or in a number of information facilities, to speak to one another and coordinate a simulation of the size of thousands and thousands or sooner or later, maybe even a billion concurrent gamers.”
