Trying to learn basic mechanics, but the tutorials seem out of date

General Tutorial & Course Discussions
, ,
1

Hi

I want to make a Fortnite creative game that works like the following…

  1. Players join and spawn into a lobby.
  2. When the round starts, they are teleported into the main game area where they battle each other.
  3. When the last person is left, they win and the round ends.
  4. Everyone is teleported back to the lobby area and the counter for the next round begins.

I’m very new to Fortnite creative, but I have been programming in Java and Python for many years, so I understand general development concepts.

I’m trying to follow the Epic tutorials, and I found the following.

It seems to have similar mechanics I am looking for, but the settings on the player spawner seem out of date.

Anyone know of a more up to date tutorial? Or can point me to something in the docs that would help me figure this out? I’ve been searching but had no luck so far.

2

Hey SecurityPedant,

There is a pre-game phase and a game phase.
In pregame phase players joined will spawn into lobby and wait for however long you have set in the island settings.
When the game starts, players will respawn with a few second countdown.
They can either respawn in the lobby or respawn into the game, depending on your spawnpad set up.
On the next round the players will respawn in the same way as when the game phase started, with a little countdown.

The Island settings can be used to control the game with last man standing, but it follows a certain way.
You can also use devices to control how the game goes, making it customizable and following how you set it to go. Each device has a bunch of settings, functions and events. You can set devices to function from other devices or its own events. Often an event also carries information of the player that initiated that event, called the instigator.

For example using a teleporters function to teleport the instigating player on recieving a spawn pads, On Player Spawned Event.

There are a few ways to go about setting up devices for the game

Can you provide more detail on your game flow ?

3

I tried looking at the documentation for game phases, to understand what they are for and what happens in each. But the documentation doesn’t really explain.

Here is what I want to happen.

  1. Players join the game and spawn into an lobby. Which for me, is an island in the sky.
  2. When the game starts, players then spawn on one of 8 locations.
  3. Players fight until last man standing
  4. Round ends, players respawn in the lobby for a short while before the next round starts.

I’ve tried a timer, that at the end of which, it uses a teleport. I set the initial player spawners to specific teams, and the teleporters each to a team, and then a timer which teleports a player at the end. It only teleports one person.

I just need to understand the basic mechanics and the documentation is a bit lacking in details.

4

For another layer of confusion, using the Launched Session to play test, there is no pregame phase, which makes debugging the beginning hard unless you upload to a Private Version.
Stuff like instead of starting on pregame spawners, you’ll start on game spawners etc.

After publishing, the player or group of players who select it first, cause it to load up on the server, it starts at Pre Game phase and follows the time defined by the Island Settings, Game Start section, usually 90 seconds with countdown to start.

Also not all devices will work in pregame phase.

Any other players who join while the game is in this pregame phase, will be present when the game starts.

Any players who join after pregame ends, become Join in Progress Players and need to be allowed for or dealt with seperately.

At the end of pregame phase, there is a Gamestart Countdown, 5 or 10 seconds.

Then the game starts, players will respawn, there is little coundown and the first round of the game starts. After a win condition is met, the first round ends, the next round of the game will start, players will see a scoreboard, lots of devices will reset, then players will respawn, have a small countdown and the next round begins.
At the end of however many rounds you have set, the game ends, players will get a victory or defeat screen, then will get prompted to return to fortnite main lobby.

OK its a bit more work to respawn in the lobby before the round ends. Usually the round will end and players will respawn at the beginning of the following round.

There are 3 ways to set the round winning conditions,
by using Island Settings exclusively which has basic functionality
and by using either Devices or Devices & Verse to make customised game flow.

Using a Last Man Standing setup with Island Settings, the round automatically ends when 1 player is alive, the round ends immediately and players respawn on the next round.
As it is this is unsuitable for a single creator to playtest the level, as soon as the round starts, it ends, so the last man standing setting should be off until all playtesting has been done.

To make your own Last Man Standing with devices, you need at least a player counter and an end game device, set to end the round, or you could also use a rounds setting device to end the round when the player counter hits 1.
For more functionality you could add another player counter to count when 2 players are alive, this is used to enable the player counter that counts for last man standing, ensuring the round won’t end until at least 2 players are on your map.
If you have teams with more than 2 players on each team, it gets a little more complex and you could use player counters per team and a system of trackers to track the team player counters

Teleporting players gets a bit ??? when its done indirectly
It sounds like the timer is only carrying the instigator information for the one player.

Using a player reference device to store each player is a good way to teleport them from anywhere.
This is what I’d do though probably not the best way…

  • Use 8 Spawnpads set to island start with a lower priority maybe set them to 3
    Have no team set on them.
  • Add another set of 8 spawnpads, not island start, set to priority 1 and set one for each team.
  • Drop in 8 player reference devices and have them register a single player from each island start spawnpads on player spawned event.
  • Then Disable that island start spawnpad from the on player updated event of the player reference device.
  • Drop in 8 Class Selectors and set them to change teams from 1 to 8
  • Use the player updated event of the Player Reference Device with the Change Player to Team function of each Class Selector, so each player reference will change it’s registered player to one of the 8 teams.
  • When the pregame phase ends and the round starts, players will spawn on the team based spawnpads, not the island start ones.
  • To stop newcomers spawning into a used player reference device, it may be a good idea to disable the associated island start spawnpad by the on player spawn event of the team based spawnpad… feels like theres holes in this logic… of milliseconds where a newcommer might spawn in before its disabled ???..maybe not… when you know what your doing, you may be able to figure out how to deal with this possible hole.
  • OK moving on… Set all the player Reference devices Activate function to activate on the timers Success event.
  • Each teleport in the 8 locations can then use thier teleport function with the On Activated event of one of each of the player reference devices. Send team 1 player to area A teleporter, etc
  • If you want random teleporting you can set the 8 locations to Group A, dont use the teleport function, instead drop in an additional teleporter to use as the sender teleporter, set it to send to group A, change target teleporter on enter and activate on all of the player reference devices activation events
  • If you use Island Settings to run game, the round will end on 1 player left, and round 2 will start with players spawning on the team spawn pads.
  • If you use devices to run the game you can respawn the players in the lobby by using a device event to spawn players on thier team spawn pad and go from there.
  • I’m still unclear on the process of a player leaving and reenabling the island start spawnpads…maybe the on player update fails event, but spawnpads seem to reset thier enable/disable state when a round starts… thats why I disabled the island start spawnpad from the start of the round as well, when the player spawns on the team spawnpads.