Summary
NPC spawners do not spawn or activate after a certain number of NPCs have been spawned in but not eliminated, even if you go far away.
This means that missions that do not require many enemies to be eliminated for completion, but spawn in many enemies, can stop future spawners from activating thus locking progression and surely causing adverse impacts to key metrics necessary to grow your community because players will not think it is a device spawn limit, but some type of mistake and leave immediately.
My island is designed for 5 person Co-Op, subtracting enemies will make it too easy, raising health is unloreful for stormtroopers or basic enemies, and requiring full facility eliminations will detract from avenues of approach for a narrative action adventure for larger facilities(e.g. stealth gameplay/go around if outnumbered/objective completability or requiring a grind/full facility wipe).
The max number of NPCs is somewhere around 100 and should be PER spawner, not for all spawners, especially if you leave the distance in which they spawned in the first place, meaning you have to get close enough to the spawner for them to spawn, when you leave that distance they should NOT be considered part of the spawned entities(a LOD system basically) as they should be despawned. Placing a billion volumes to hook into the despawn field is not a viable workaround either, as players could be separated and not be getting the experience in full.
Please select what you are reporting on:
Unreal Editor for Fortnite
What Type of Bug are you experiencing?
Devices
Steps to Reproduce
– New project → Star wars brand templates → Grid XL
– Place and configure the spawners and volumes as follows:
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Two giant volumes, one in each corner.
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Two in one corner, on in the other corner: 80 spawned each, 80 total spawned each, “starts enabled” [false], spawn on enabled [true], “enable” field-> Volume 1 or 2: on enter.
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These are enemies or on a different team.
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For ease of testing I used the Hero device “The Mandalorian” → On Spawned to traverse the map quickly.
– Head to the corner with 2 spawners, get in range for them to start spawning, let the spawners max out, it won’t spawn 160 NPCs.
– Fly in the opposite direction and observe the other spawner will not spawn any NPCs due to the limit being hit even though you are light years away.
Expected Result
NPC spawners should not count as active if you are not in range.
Observed Result
NPC spawners count as active no matter how far away you are, preventing progression and spawners in future missions from activating.
Platform(s)
PC
Video
Additional Notes
I cannot in good faith ship my island with this active as it will surely tank performance metrics once players hit this and start leaving. Let’s be honest with ourselves, most players won’t read what’s on screen much less think critically about device limitations especially if they have 0 experience in any type of game development.
I was able to pinpoint this because I have content skipping buttons that allow me to leap-frog missions so I was able to test it immediately after game start, however if I went through the missions as a player would, it didn’t work. After that it took some big braining to figure out what the source was because in some playtest I would eliminate more NPCs than other playtests, so it worked or barely worked sometimes.