Multiplayer Game Programming: Architecting Networked Games,

Chapter 11. Real-World Engines

While larger game studios still largely develop their own internal game engines, for smaller studios it is increasingly common to utilize an off-the-shelf engine. For most genres of networked games, it can be much more time- and cost-effective for a smaller studio to utilize an existing engine. In this case, the code the network engineer will write is at a much higher-level than the majority of this book.

This chapter takes a look at two very popular engines used in many games today, Unreal 4 and Unity, and investigates how networked multiplayer functionality can be implemented in both of these engines.

Unreal Engine 4

The Unreal Engine has existed in one form or another since the 1998 release of the video game ...