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Comment by upupandup | Hacker News Reader

Networking falls outside the typical game engine. A game engine is largely rendering, physics, controls. The questions you are asking is largely design related and solved by existing networking state tools. Most of which is proprietary or require expertise in networking domain. Seems like your question is more of "How do I build an MMO" which is almost certainly a solution looking for a problem.

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Networking falls outside the typical game engine.

The major game engines include networking.

* Unreal Engine, networking section, documentation.[1]

* Unity game engine, networking section, documentation.[2]

My own interest is in metaverse systems, with big, detailed, free-play worlds. Wrangling all that content presents a set of problems that are not well solved yet. Which is why the highly publicized metaverses look so much worse than a typical AAA title. They haven't solved content wrangling, so they have to limit content complexity so severely it looks like 1995. I'm plugging away on that problem. (Demo video: [3]). It seems to be quite solveable, but there's not much written on the subject and I'm having to re-invent too much.

[1] https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/networking-and-multi...

[2] https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UNet.html

[3] https://video.hardlimit.com/w/peBesyAgtzfRWS5FnDQQtn

The "big ones" like Unity, Cryengine, Unreal etc. include many many things. They are absolutely huge compared to what a single game using them actually needs. A game engine is just that: an engine for games to run on to seperate engine and gameplay programming.

If your team decides to create singleplayer game(s), and your own engine as a platform for it, then building full networking and netcode into that would be out of scope. That would still be a game engine nonetheless.

Can the term game engine include networking? Absolutely. Does game engine inherently imply networking? No, I don't think so.

> A game engine is largely rendering, physics, controls.

If "controls" are an integral part of a game engine, then networking is as well. Networking is just another control/input device. You read bytes from your joystick driver, you read bytes from your network driver.

Building a robust input handling system that can handle a variety of input devices, high latencies, failures, recoveries, etc is absolutely an integral part of building a modern game engine.

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