Hacker News Reader

Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

It's funny how Fortnite became the ultimate pitch for UE4's versatility.

The recent announcement of Fortnite on iOS/Android seems like a big "Look what you can do with UE4"!

Infinity Blade back in the day was essentially a UE3-on-iOS tech demo that had unexpectedly good gameplay. (there was a game mechanic that enticed you to examine and pan around the highly-detailed environment!)

And that tech demo eventually became a pretty decent book series by Brandon Sanderson.

I wouldn't be shocked at all if they got made into a TV show at some point.

It’s also how epic reduced the input delay in a UE4 update a few months ago

Why would moving the camera back slightly to create a 3rd person view demonstrate more versatility than there was before?

I'm referring mostly to using Fortnite as the sample game for the new features, which definitely would not have happened a couple months ago.

this question is both reductive and leading.

I was surprised to learn Tekken 7 and Soul Calibur 6 used/are using Unreal.

AAA fighters are a long way from it's FPS roots.

They're hardly the only ones. Injustice 1&2,Guilty Gear Xrd -Sign- & Revelator, Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite, Dragon Ball FighterZ - these days, it's actually less common for AAA fighters to not use the Unreal Engine.

Here's a really wild use: as a render engine for an animated kids show. https://youtu.be/Mfqj3CFZyxU

I think it's funny that Fortnite will probably cause the inevitable unraveling of UE4, as yet another game engine without baked-in anti-cheat.

Cheating in Fortnite is practically unheard of at this point. But it won't be long until the player base is just as jaded as PUBG's: https://github.com/Griizz/Fortnite-Hack

Given that Epic makes Fortnite and Unreal, is it that implausible to assume that "lots of people wanting to cheat in Fortnite" might instead lead to "Epic builds anti-cheat stuff for Unreal, puts it in the next release"?

(FWIW, a little searching reveals that Fortnite seems to use the exact same anti-cheat company as PUBG: https://www.battleye.com)

I have a few reactions here:

1. Why should Epic go and reimplement anti-cheat that you can grab off the shelf?

2. A big part of limiting cheating comes down to the specific game design and implementation. You need a server implementation that is as distrusting of clients as possible, you need secure (networking) code, etc. Anti-cheat is not a cure-all.

3. Even without anti-cheat, Unreal Engine is still well-used by tons of single-player video games. I don't see it "unraveling" regardless.

> 2. A big part of limiting cheating comes down to the specific game design and implementation. You need a server implementation that is as distrusting of clients as possible, you need secure (networking) code, etc. Anti-cheat is not a cure-all.

Unfortunately that's just not realistic for a large category of games. If you can trust the clients to some degree then you can really really offload a lot of server work. It's not feasible to process user's mouse input on the server in an FPS for example. Not just from a server load standpoint but from a latency standpoint.

You don't need to do this in real time, instead you could log the data (e.g. mouse clicks, key presses) to something like a database, Kafka, or Kenesis. Now you've unloaded the anti cheat logic to other servers.

You don't necessarily need to ban a player immediately. If you can accurately ban people within a day of using a cheat, then that's a pretty serious deterrent from using them.

I would think I'd rather avoid the whole issue via nerfing hitscan and high-velocity-projectile weapons, and buffing lower-velocity-projectile and melee weapons.

There have been successful FPS games with that formula (Tribes comes to mind). There are cheats/hacked clients, but they're on a much less problematic level (mostly around visibility).

Fortnite currently uses EasyAntiCheat and BattlEye [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/82xyhb/launch_e...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com