Sunday, May 25

UEFN Has Been Out For Some Weeks, What are the Features?

Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) has not even been released for half a month yet, and people have made quite the maps and discoveries of its features.

A little creativity along with an understanding of UEFN will get regular users quite far, apparently. As for Fortnite Creative creators that already made maps in ‘Creative 1.0’ and were ready for ‘Creative 2.0’ for ages? Their limitations go quite a bit beyond just that.

The first things that obviously have to be mentioned are recreations of the old maps and Epic Games’ statements on them.

Within days, two maps were very well-known as “OG” map recreations: Alas OG Battle Royale and Reboot Royale • OG Fortnite.

Both maps’ biggest issue appears to be the UEFN memory limit, which has caused both to remove many things causing their maps to become unpolished as a result, with Reboot Royale seemingly coming out better off among the two. At least visually. As both maps were supposedly well over the memory limit, they had to quickly try to do whatever they could to quickly post their maps while the hype was high.

Now, unfortunately for fans of Fortnite Chapters other than Chapter 1, Epic Games has released a statement disallowing the recreations of any Chapter beside Chapter 1, thus limiting nostalgia-seekers to the first ten seasons. Although, a more correct phrasing might be that they released a statement allowing the recreations of Chapter 1 seasons with exceptions being recreations of anything from those seasons that were crossovers. Like the Thanos items or the Batman location that replaced Tilted Towers once.

Unreal Editor for Fortnite
Unreal Editor for Fortnite

Now, addressing the memory limit issue which is what prevented polished recreations of the “OG” Fortnite map: Tim Sweeney, Epic Games founder and CEO, recently got interviewed by three very popular YouTubers in the Fortnite community: Ali-A, SypherPK, and Lachlan.

It was asked how large the memory limit could be made.

Tim Sweeney replied with the fact that Epic Games could make the memory limits whatever they wanted. However, the larger the memory limit, the larger the chance that people would give up on many maps as they take longer and longer to load. Perhaps they may even give up on UEFN islands entirely if they associated its islands with long loading times.

Tim Sweeney equated it to waiting for a webpage to load. People simply don’t want to wait that long for something to load, which was a very valid point made. It was also said that Epic Games is willing to change the memory limit in the future.

So the memory limit has nothing to do with Epic Games being miserly about storage size, unlike what some may think.

Someone has already begun making progress with making procedurally generated worlds in Fortnite, and has posted it on twitter.

Some decent horror maps have already been made as well, with some utilizing first-person mode, something that has yet to even be released to Battle Royale, unless one counts the glitches people used some time back to get into first-person mode in Battle Royale modes.

UEFN Features:

Player count.

For the first time in Fortnite’s existence, Fortnite is beginning to allow players to roughly see its player count. 10% of players are allowed to see which modes have how many players playing them. A very useful feature for creative modes as it allows players to know which maps have enough players that they are not deserted if they join them. If Epic Games sees no problem with this, then it is likely that all players will get this feature soon in the discovery menu.

Bannable Acts

  • Having copyrighted content in UEFN maps, whether published or unpublished, will get you banned according to Fortnite. It is heavily advised to avoid using copyrighted materials and to simply avoid anything to do with other IPs without the consultation of a lawyer, as exceptions are tricky.
  • Explicit content on a UEFN map may also get you permanently banned depending on how explicit it is, and likely a temporary ban or simply a warning if it is barely explicit.

A Creator’s UEFN Map

Once someone makes an original map in UEFN, they may use that map outside of Fortnite in whatever projects they want; whether that is to make a game with it or some cinematic video or something else.

Creator Economy 2.0

Creators Economy 2.0 will see Creative Modes creators getting paid by how much time players spend on their islands, how many new players the islands bring in, and how many players keep returning to play said islands.

40% of all the money Fortnite generates from its in-game purchases will go towards paying these creators.

They will have to be over 18 years of age with an account over 90 days old to be eligible, however. 

Epic Games has also stated that it plans to eventually reward players younger than 18 as well to incentivize them for their efforts, but there are not many details on that currently.

The only way creators got paid before was through their creator codes getting entered a period of time before a player bought something in the item shop.