Quark Multiplayer is powering past the game engine's player limits.
(Image credit: MetaGravity)
Unity is already a popular choice of engine for multiplayer games, as we mention in our pick of the best game development software. It still has its limits (at 100 players for the built-in networking) but a new software development kit is helping to blast those to smithereens.
MetaGravity's Quark Multiplayer is a networking solution designed to provide an easy, cost-effective and scalable way for developers to build multiplayer games. Unity's development team has been hitting some huge numbers and thinks it can go further (also see our Unity explainer and our Unity 6 review.
Writing on LinkedIn, Senior Unity Developer Marek Bakalarczuk has revealed an insight into just how much Quark is powering Unity past its player limits.
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"Unity’s built-in networking usually tops out around 100 players. With Quark Multiplayer, we pushed that to 15,000 players in a single shard. After a bunch of optimizations, we hit 300,000 and we think 1 million is possible," Marek writes.
"This isn't lightweight either; we're running at a 30Hz server tick rate and approximately 103 bytes of data per player per tick. The biggest challenge? Not the server – it was client-side performance in Unity. We had to optimize everything: ECS-based animations, custom memory handling, multithreading, and extensive profiling", he adds.
There are Quark Multiplayer software development kits for both Unity and Unreal Engine as well as a universal low-level API compatible with any custom engine. The platform is still in early access, and requests are being analysed based on each project and production stage.
Unity is still the most-used individual game engine today, although developers might want to check out Epic Games' tutorials on switching from Unity to Unreal Engine 5.
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Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.
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