Hey, I’m trying to understand the limitations/possibilities of UEFN and right now it seems to me that you are basically not allowed to tweak the vast majority of gameplay related mechanic of Fortnite. For example you are locked into the regular Fortnite TPS view and weapon/movement behavior. So no matter what, what you create will still feel like Fortnite and UEFN isn’t yet a fully modular mod and extension kit, it’s more of a fancier map editor. Or am I missing something?
edited: to answer the question though it is more then a map editor you can look for UEFN games now with a filter through Fortnite to see what people are creating, discord also has a really good showcase - all done with the current limitations.
TL;DR
a lot of limitations currently exist
the roadmap for UEFN looks promising and will allow us to do more
you’ll eventually be able to remove the ‘Fortnite’ feeling and do more customization, your own additions.
if you look up the roadmap for UEFN you’ll see the time line on when they expect to have different features, more customization etc. with AAA tiles being 2+ years out.
toward the end of 2023 it looks promising and will open the flood gates for more creativity.
you’re right about limitations although we have quite a few they did introduce verse and we are able to write some pretty good logic.
some people have been working around things like first person view but at some point they did say you would be able to fully customize things and the ‘Fortnite’ feeling could be removed.
I’ve been using this as a sandbox just to get familiar with the framework they have in place for hopes later this year a lot more will be implemented and things such as creating custom weapons, vehicles, npcs, first person etc. will be possible without ‘hacks’
its a bit frustrating right now because you’re somewhat boxed in but big picture it looks good! my only fear is I believe epic invested into core games at one point and they were trying to achieve something similar but it never really took off…UEFN in beta is already showing how good it can get though!
(the early tester’s of UEFN have described the changes/iterations over the last year or so as night and day so this is another good sign)
my crazy thoughts are (none are verified)
this is Epic Games (Unreal Engine)
if anyone can do it they can because of being Epic
UEFN will eventually get re-branded to remove the Fortnite from it
Roblox will start sweating sooner then later
Indie developers/small studios will invest heavy
people will be making $100k+ a month
maybe another form of monetization at some point?
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You figured out our plan! UEFN is “done” when we’re able to rewrite all of the Fortnite gameplay code within Verse and be on the same toolset inside and outside of Epic, and the general APIs (/Verse.org and /UnrealEngine.com) are available in Unreal Engine. Then UEFN=UE and Fortnite is just one of the places you can go.
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One of the limitations that is really holding me back is the inability to save a player’s state for their future gaming sessions. I have big plans for my studio to build a fantasy RPG in UEFN, but with no way to save state we are dead in the water.
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This is definitely something I’m keeping a close eye on too, a lot of my ideas and games I plan to make will rely heavily on communicating with the transfer of persisted data. Whether that be with some internal system within UEFN or having access to communicate to my own external server via Verse/HTTP.
If it’s internal I wonder what the limitations will be in terms of the amount of data we can store, the format its in, how we query it etc and if it allows for external HTTP requests, what the limitations of that will be based on the teams security concerns.
It’s difficult to follow though as I’ve seen contradicting posts throughout the forum on how this will be implemented or if it will be implemented at all. I’m holding out that it will be, and in the meantime I’m just enjoying learning UEFN/Verse some more and just being patient while these features roll out.
I just need to be able to store a string value for each player; will probably use JSON format.
I’d honestly be very surprised if they allowed the game to access external servers. I think that would open up not only security concerns, but also potential bandwidth issues and make it difficult to enforce their terms of use (like not using copyrighted content).
The team is working on simple but useful persistence support to accomplish things like this.
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Fantastic! I look forward to it.
Same for me, a simple JSON data storage would suffice for most things.
I did think the same in regards to external servers and the ability to make HTTP requests, but then I read that Roblox offers that functionality? I haven’t confirmed it and I honestly couldn’t tell you the specifics as I’ve never played it but it gave me some hope at least.
My only concern with it being stored internally is would I have access to it outside of UEFN/Verse via an API? With rate limiting etc of course. It’d be nice to know we could offer a wider experience to the games through websites/apps to show their progress/stats.
Still, really exciting to hear it’s being worked on!
EDIT
Ah I’ve just read this, feel like this is very relevant after what I mentioned so I thought I’d link to it:
Excellent