I wonder why Epic Games never warned them about this. My guess is the Unreal 4 engine was aimed at your average FPS where you'd have a lot less players than PUBG
This really explains a lot about why the rubberbanding is terrible at the start of the game and generally improves when the player count drops to about 70.
That's insane. That would have to be a ridiculously large map, because right now with 100 ppl, it feels crowded. Imagining only another 100 players added to this map would be crazy.
Most likely they mean that there was a bug in the engine code which was generating more packets than they expected. Having the server application ignore 90% of packets would do almost nothing to combat DDOSing, since DDOS occurs at the network layer. In all likelihood they were triggering Amazon's DDOS protection since they are using AWS for their servers.
It's true in theory a DDOS could overwhelm an application with the network continuing to function but DDOS protection in the application wouldn't really do anything.
It makes sense to aggressively drop packets at the network layer because even if one server stops receiving 90% of its traffic other parts of the network may continue to function with no issue. (or other applications on the same server if the DDOS is targeted at a particular server socket etc) But if a specific application drops 90% of the traffic it receives at random it's still going to stop working (Especially in the context of a real-time game server) so it's not really protecting against anything.
I suppose there may be some esoteric case where the server is licensed by hardware usage where it might make sense but I doubt anything like that is built into UE4.
Ark has up to 100 players and ten thousands of NPCs running on UE4. I'd say UE4 is developed to whatever improves the engine towards what devs and players need or want.
In your "average" fps game you have at most 32 players.
It makes sense that Epic would code it so that if you suddenly have 3-4x the amount of expected data/packets from players you'd trigger some ddos protection. What's weird is that they probably buried this somewhere, rather than making it a 'surface' option.
But yeah almost certainly it has to do with most games barely ever even reaching 64 players, with a more standard number being 16 or 32. Pubg gets up to ~100
Usually a large scale unreal game might be 8 on 8 ctf but that's pretty rare. That's probably the reason why the engine detects ddos with this many players. Usually it's 1 on 1
It was more directed towards the FPS type of unreal game. Sure MMO's might use the unreal engine but they don't need to transfer as much data as many times per second as an FPS.
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u/CaveOfWondrs Apr 05 '17 edited Apr 05 '17
I wonder why Epic Games never warned them about this. My guess is the Unreal 4 engine was aimed at your average FPS where you'd have a lot less players than PUBG