Distribute MMO Server Payload

We’re planning an MMO game with a special kind of server network to distribute payload between the “participants” (within the network), thus exposing only a single server instance to the players.

The problem I’m seeing is that, as for my understanding, UE4 is not capable of such a distributed computation, or at least I haven’t found any documentation on it. While UE4 makes networking ad-hoc sessions and distributed servers easy through its property system and remote proc calls, it would seem like it also removes direct contact with networking entirely.

We could write our own server engine which does exactly what we need, but I’m afraid that would only come at the expense of physics. So my question is, does UE4 only support “whole” dedicated servers?

If so, I’m guessing we’ll need to build a custom engine for the server network, I take it? Is the Unreal Engine even capable of such a server network?

Cheers!

I can only state what I know. I have seen MMO’s for UE4 and I can state that UE4 does support a “dedicated” server mode. But how to bridge the two is beyond me. I’d love to know as I have an interest in this as well.

There appears to be an MMO starter kit available to purchase, It looks like many of your questions could be addressed there:

MMO Starter Kit Forum

There defiantly seems you can develop your own socket layer without sacrificing the physics.

That’s a great starting point. I’ll check into it and see if I can manage to get this thing to run the way I intend to. Thanks for your comment!