Appeal for Networking

[gothboiclique]

I'm excited for Ultra Engine! Having owned Leadwerks for over a year now, I like it, especially the fact that it's easy to pick up and not bogged with hundreds of pages of outdated documentation. Last summer, I spent a month and a half trying to implement my own networking system. I've dabbled with Unreal, Unity, and Cryengine as well trying to experiment with multiplayer games. Obviously, these engines have much more backing support but I am really hoping we can see some updates to multiplayer gaming in Ultra Engine.

1. Leadwerks multiplayer is too barebones. It's understandable and expected that games implement their own multiplayer architectures due to different constraints, clients, playstyles, etc. However, some basic networking stuff built in would make the engine so much more enjoyable to use.
2. State synchronization, replication, interpolation, extrapolation, etc. would be super helpful to have these added with attributes in classes so that every multiplayer game does not have to implement their own state synchronization method.
3. Adding on to the above point, support for a server authoritative networking model built in.
4. Leadwerks does not support (as far as I could find) a headless mode for running server authoritative game. It would be great if Ultra engine could support running headless with no GPU and only physics caluclations.
5. Windows only support hampers cloud deployment, it increases the cost of VMs substantially. If Ultra Engine could support some sort of mode where it could run on Linux with physics, this would help.
6. Support for multiple debug/game windows at the same time so I could run a server and client (or multiple) to test their behavior. This would really help improve the dev flow for multiplayer.
7. Bink video support! This would be awesome if it was built in.

Understandably, this is a lot to ask, let me know your thoughts. Curious if anyone else attempting multiplayer has anything to add.

[aiaf]

My opinion is multiplayer should be available as plugin not built in the engine.

Keep engine lean and mean and good at what it does, not feature bloat.

 

I understand the need for some of the features above of course.

I did some multiplayer with Leadwerks used POCO c++ libs with no problems.

[Josh]

One big thing Ultra has is object serialization in the components system. This even works with C++. This is useful for game saves and for...networking!

Ultra will also never call any Vulkan commands if you just don't call World::Render().

Other stuff you mentioned sounds nice, but I can't comment on the timeline right now.