Normally, when starting in game development, you begin with the basics and prototypes are usually local, but have you ever wanted to try or worked on a multiplayer game?

Having many entities in multiplayer usually runs into a common problem: the network. Since each one has to constantly send its position, the more there are, the more data and saturation, making it unviable.

In this case, I’m going to show one of the approaches that Senior Unreal Engine developer Vladimir Khanin experimented with, managing to have more than 1000 NPCs in a scene without any connection issues.

Vladimir explained that the idea is simple: the server doesn’t say where the NPC is at all times, but how and when it is going to move. How does this work? 

It starts with the server sending the information that describes the NPC’s movement, from a starting point (A) to another (B) over a specific number of frames. Each segment includes: 

Identifiers and small flags are also there to maintain order and state. 

Now, what happens on the client with this information? The segment is received, the destination is reconstructed, and the movement plays over the time defined by the number of frames.

When new segments arrive, they replace previous ones based on their identifier. This to keep the continuity without depending on constant updates from the server.

A very important  point here is how the data is distributed,  because instead of sending all entities in a single tick, each update sends only a part of the total. Also, the system only sends data when movement changes, if an NPC stays static, it generates no traffic.

If you’d like to see more from Vladimir, below is his profile where you can find more experiments.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladimir-khanin-1028529a/ 

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