NPC spawning degredation when using Despawn features

Please select what you are reporting on:

Unreal Editor for Fortnite

What Type of Bug are you experiencing?

AI

Summary

We are having issues with AI spawners degrading their spawn rate when we enable / disable our NPC Spawner devices. When the game starts, or only has a single player, we experience very snappy spawns and despawns from zone to zone. After time, or if there are multiple players in the round, the time to spawn NPCs when we enable the device is dramatically increased. We’ve tried using the Despawn AIs When Disabled parameter, along with the DespawnAll() function.

We are trying to build a larger open world, so enabling / disabling NPC Spawners is needed due to the size of the map. When we repeatedly enable and disable spawners in different zones, the spawn times increase until it can take upwards of 30-60 seconds to spawn a new NPC, even if we are nowhere near the 90 NPC cap. We’ve additionally tried using the Reset() option after both enabling and disabling, but that didn’t seem to help.

Steps to Reproduce

Setup ~50 NPC spawners across a map with Custom NPCs.
Set the spawners to spawn 5 NPCs each.
Disable the “Enabled at Game Start” parameter on them.
Setup a Verse script that Enables the spawners when any player is within 2500 units, and Disables when players exceed this amount.
Have several players join (or use dummy agents) to run around the differerent areas, activating and deactivating the NPC Spawners.
Spawning frequency starts to slow down within the first minute.

Expected Result

Snappy spawns so players don’t miss batches of NPCs.

Observed Result

It can take upwards of 30 seconds for NPCs to spawn when session lengths exceed 15 minutes, even when we aren’t close to the 90 NPC cap.

Platform(s)

Windows

Island Code

4020-0120-5095

The status of FORT-771576 incident has been moved from ‘To Do’ to ‘Ready for QA’. Resolution Reason: ‘Fixed’

One additional issue with using Despawn AIs When Disabled. It seems like when this is triggered frequently, it actually lowers the total pool of NPCs that you can have on your map. This seems to happen relatively quickly when enabling / disabling every few seconds.

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