The Making of Side 7: Gundam Evolution private server project

Unreal&#x27;s highlevel of packaing and managing assets for years meant modding was locked off. Unity games often shipped on PC with loose files and hacking C# broke after each update but at least was an option.<p>Over time the modding community has leverage this high level by building unreal native tools. The net result has been the same sort of cross tool use we saw with Gamebryo. Back with Gamebryo the Civilization modding shared tools with sid meier&#x27;s railroads and even early skyrim and fallout modding.<p>Now the Unreal tools mean mods can be done in blueprint and should not break after every update like C# based mods. Likewise the common pak format used by unreal games (common because consoles prefer the pak for faster loading), means mods can replace files without overwriting files. Aka, mod conflicts become a reference overwrite issue and not a file overwrite issue.<p>As a developer of an unreal based game its pretty nice to know modding is no longer locked out. You still need&#x2F;should provide the community with a modkit, but even those the community can generate on their own if they care.

Companies should keep their servers running.<p>One of the reasons: if you want people to buy your next thing. (I was fairly highly ranked online in one of the Ace Combat fighter pilot franchise games, and had built a stable of planes in another one. But when they shut down the servers for the previous installment, after introducing a new one, I found I couldn&#x27;t get interested in investing in the new one, if it was only going to get ripped out from under me like the previous.)

Even if you don&#x27;t if your game is popular enough they will reverse engineer the server-client communication protocol.<p>The only place where I see that not happening is the future where game are 100% streamed and your computers is just a screen + controller (stadia 2.0). Then they&#x27;ll have to settle for knock off clones of your game.

&gt; Fortuitously, the creators of &quot;GUNDAM EVOLUTION&quot; provided a timely notice about the game&#x27;s end of service (EOS), affording me ample opportunity to start capturing game data packets<p>This is always one of the biggest issues with trying to make a private server. Ideally, we should be proactively capturing game data packets and archiving them for every game that has an online component, to ensure that somebody in the future will have that available if they&#x27;re interested in developing a private server for whatever game.

I think it&#x27;s common for multiplayer game engines to implement single-player by running a local server on loopback (or via an equivalent internal mechanism). At the very least, I believe the Source Engine and Minecraft do this. Perhaps Unreal Engine does this also, and if so, that might be why the client has server functionality.

&quot;Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don&#x27;t editorialize.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

The game itself looks good. Playing bugger BF 2042 its sad to see such polished (comparing to EA crap) product goes so fast into EOL :(<p>Like others said - do you kill your product and probably company? Open source it :)