
Epic Games acquires Cloudgine - mariuz
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-games-welcomes-cloudgine
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mastax
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.

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

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

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shaded-enmity
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.

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bhouston
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.

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vvanders
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.

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arcanus
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?

