Why Mercenaries has been shelved

General Feedback & Requests
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This is the last update on our now 6-month project Mercenaries:

Project has been shelved because we can’t fix it. A hotfix broke live edit permanently for us, due to a verse device containing the game’s main story. We cant remove it, and also we don’t know how to fix it because testing if something works requires 40 mins of wait time. We don’t have the tools to find what causes the issue, content service shows no runtime errors, validation fails in game without any errors shown, we cant launch live edit due to server time out, we can’t publish or upload private versions, none of the published versions or private versions we have after adding the main story of the game run inside Fortnite (server times out or we get MM error #2).

Even touching any UI in the project will lag it for 5 mins, sometimes more. We decided to stop development until Epic focuses on large projects. Editor performance has gotten worse for us consistently in the last 3 months in UEFN.


Not a single issue is because of us, the editor just can’t handle complexity atm, world streaming doesn’t really optimize correctly the world based on distance and verse devices would crash for multiple reasons now, sometimes even causing UEFN to freeze (Verse Tab open for example) and many more. Even back in the day when we were able to launch live edit, world streaming would cause the character to fall through streamed geometry, in both edit mode and play mode (all modes + published).

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Just using this reply to double down on our frustrations!! Such an awesome project that we can’t even release!

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I’ll second the question about big projects. It is quite hard to work with them not only because of the huge amount of work, but also because of the problems with UEFN. For example, we faced the problem that every time we click on “End game”, the number of packets drops to 0, the game gives an error and we are thrown out to the fortnite lobby. Even just updating Verse now requires completely restarting Fortnite and preparing the project (5+ minutes). As you can imagine, it’s almost impossible to work in this environment, especially when trying to catch a bug, as each iteration has gone from 20 seconds to 5+ minutes.
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