Fortnite: Battle Royale prompted engine-wide Unreal improvements

Game developers working with Unreal Engine are about to reap the benefits of Epic Games’ recent adventure into developing a battle royale game

In a post shared to the company’s blog, Epic points out that a number of improvements coming to the next few versions of Unreal Engine are the direct result to some of the challenges the company rose to meet when developing Fortnite: Battle Royale.

The game mode drops 100 players into a steadily shrinking play area to duke it out and try and emerge as the last scavenger standing. In order to handle some of the more demanding requirements of such a project, Epic says it made a number of performance, memory, and workflow optimizations that have circled back to improve the next few versions of Unreal Engine.

For example, Unreal Engine 4.19 will be getting a number of server optimizations that came as a result of the game needing to handle 100 simultaneous players all while maintaining 20hz and minimizing bandwidth. While the team found that much of the needed work was related to the game’s own code, ten total engine-side server tweaks came as a result of Battle Royale. 

There are changes related to building and rendering a large map headed to Unreal in 4.19 as well as a number of console-specific optimizations and improvements that developers can expect to see in the 4.18 later this month.

The full breakdown of each coming change can be found over on Epic Games’ blog. Even if you’re not working with Unreal Engine for your current project, the post makes for an interesting read thanks to the way the team breaks each of the optimizations down and explains how each fix sprung up from Fortnite: Battle Royale’s development.