I am making arcade racers in Fortnite (so to be clear, not as a Rocket Racing map) and there are a few things holding back Fortnite from being a racing game destination (which could be lucrative for Epic because it would accelerate (pun intended) the sales of RR skins for Fortnite.
Here are some feature suggestion related to the expansion of RR vehicle device abilities to enable developers to make all sorts of racing experiences in Fortnite:
- Ability to set some values to zero: Many options offer a minimum of 0.1, which prevents developers from removing features like boost completely. Other posts have detailed exactly which changes should be made here. I second their request.
- Ability to change some of these properties in Verse. This allows players to properly code in Race Starts (instead of relying on barriers that disappear after a countdown), modify top speed depending on road surface, simulated weather, etc.
- Ability to “raycast” downwards to find out what material is being driven on. Useful to determine whether the vehicle is off-road where the handing can be modified through code.
- Number of gears, gear ratio definitions in device properties. Much like the Unreal Engine vehicle, would allow developers to create exactly the sort of vehicle they need for the gameplay being offered.
- Ability to modify steering angles in relation to vehicle speed. I believe the Unreal Engine car allows for this as well. Many modern games allow for drastic turning angles at low speeds and reduced angles for high speeds. Arcade racers often keep it high for all speeds. Give developers the ability to customize this.
- Ability to link to the Fortnite store so players can see which vehicles are currently available for purchase. Ideally made so that the developer gets a marginal cut for the sale as it occurs from their map.
- Make data like vehicle speed, current gear, RPM, and others available to the developer for custom UI.
- Ability to hide the Rocket Racing vehicle UI.
- Ability to make checkpoints invisible so that developers can replace checkpoints with their own visuals.
- Disable the ability to drive on walls/ceiling. I understand there are “surface counter/surface latch” variables in the details panel, but those are hard to decipher and seem to still result in magnetic wall driving abilities. The ability to turn this off completely would be nice.
Those would be a great start and enough for many racing developers. I’m sure there are more ideas that can be added, but these alone would open up so many possibilities and would allow developers to create all sort of racing games.
Thanks for your time!