Epic Games acquires Cloudgine | Hacker News Reader

Epic Games acquires Cloudgine

unrealengine.com

38 pointsmariuz8 comments

Sounds like it's being used in Crackdown 3 to run multiplayer destruction physics. I suppose that makes sense. Run the simulation once on a beefy machine and send the results out. Of course it's one more thing that stops working when they shut down the servers in 5 years.

What do you mean? Cloudgine is the company making Crackdown 3.

Cloudgine is responsible for the core engine tech (based on UE4). The actual game content is Reagent Games and Sumo Digital.

I don't know what you're responding to, I assume it's this part:

> Of course it's one more thing that stops working when they shut down the servers in 5 years.

Game servers are usually run by the game's publisher. They are not run indefinitely. When they turn off, this game will no longer have large destruction physics. I'm not saying that Epic will 'turn off' Cloudgine in typical aquihire fashion.

Assuming they integrate the technology tightly enough into the core of the engine could this potentially serve as a sort of "DRM" where you can, by setting a single flag in the UE4 editor, make the given entity or subsystem remote, and thus never exposing the actual guts of the system to the users? If so, I guess that this might enable a new way of integrating proprietary middlewares which are otherwise very hard to get your hands onto.

I think that if their technology also allows for dynamic scaling based on current/projected demand this could potentially save a lot of money since, at least from my limited experience of running various game servers for ~thousands of people, 70% of the time the demand is between 10-20% of the peak demand.

19 or so employees? Is this an acqu-hire? My concern is that the market for middleware tools like this is really small and not really enough to support 19 employees.

I worry that this makes it more expensive to run cloud servers if each cloud server needs to run the simulation for the users involved. Now instead of some simple message passing and synchronization, it needs to run CPU intensive physical simulations.

I am not completely convinced that this is to integrate this into UE4 but rather to give this team an out and add employee headcount to fast growing Epic Games.

That's generally been the case anyways, otherwise you open yourself up cheating since a local host can/will manipulate state.

You can do some checksumming but largely state moves too quickly to make it more a deterrent than a full solution.

How big are these studios? With only 19 people, I'm guessing this was 'just' a few million dollar deal, does that sound about right?

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