Reckon you can do better than PlayerUnknown? Now you’ve got the engine you need. With the demands of Fortnite’s new battle royale mode, developers Epic have made a number of improvements to Unreal 4 – one of the most popular engines in the games industry, and which is free to use.
Jeremy does a lovely series on games using Unreal. Here’s his latest, looking at political adventure The Occupation.
Long view distances are a key part of the battle royale experience – at least, according to the template laid down by Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene, both in his early Arma mods and his recent smash hit Battlegrounds.
Fortnite: Battle Royale keeps to that template, with a playable area of five-and-a-half square kilometres, all of which you can see at once when parachuting in. In a blog post, Epic say they wanted to support long view distances, and that they needed to improve their “level-of-detail solution” to make that possible.
Accordingly, they’ve made many performance, memory, and workflow optimisations that will benefit every developer using Unreal Engine 4, especially if you’re building a game with similar requirements. Epic say “all of these improvements are already available in both Perforce and GitHub.” If you’d rather wait for them to be pushed to you, many will ship with Unreal Engine 4.18 later this month, with the rest coming in 4.19.
Check out Epic’s post for more detail on exactly what they’ve tweaked.