[andrewmcwatters]

Yeah, everything about early id Tech is just, without exaggeration, decades ahead of Unreal. Of course, sex sells, so since Unreal renders fairly well, for this reason alone I think it attracts amateurs.

I think Godot wants to do the same thing, and I'm sure it'll work, but the authors are just like the rest of the open source community in that they don't actually work on features meaningful to most games.

Back to Unreal networking: what really sucks is that you can't easily just avoid using it by using your own networking subsystem. Because features like default actor movement are tightly bound to the RPC system, and concepts like network visibility are directly integrated with actors, you may unintentionally end up screwing up what needs to be networked to clients unless you very closely match what the existing networking code does.

It's sophisticated enough that I suspect there isn't a single company or individual who has done this, because that too would be far more effort than it might be worth.

It's so gross to me that you immediately cannot use things like the replication graph if you decide you want your game to support split screen. IIRC, that was a technical limitation for some reason. I could be misremembering. It's just disgusting.

[TulliusCicero]

Interesting. I know that Frost Giant (heir apparent to the Starcraft/Warcraft part of Blizzard) has said that they're building their own gameplay logic engine and networking stack on top on UE5 for their RTS, I wonder if what you're saying is part of why.

[intelVISA]

UE is the last engine I'd use for RTS, though people have done wonders in spite of it -- check out the tech behind HŌRU game for some impressive examples.