[2019] Build Limit Challenges

Hey everyone,

We wanted to take this opportunity to dive in a little more and explain the challenges we face around build limits in Storm Shield Defenses.

With an ever-expanding game like Fortnite, it is a continual battle to manage the game's technical performance. Structure limits on SSDs are one of those precautions we take to help keep performance in a healthy state across all platforms.

All game clients are limited in memory and increasing the build limit would exacerbate memory pressure, leading to an increase in out of memory crashes. We are already making many careful tradeoffs in game systems to manage the memory budget.

Larger bases require longer load times, increasing the wait to get in zone. Once in zone, base complexity is a drag on nearly every system - impacting rendering, AI pathfinding, combat simulation, and more. This can lead to poor framerates, hitching, de-sync issues, and disconnects.

While the actual storage cost is minimal, loading and saving large bases does have a performance cost on our backend servers as well that needs to scale to millions of players. These bases involve a great deal of player time and creativity. We take that investment seriously and are always looking to minimize the risks to that data.

We’re still not satisfied with the current performance of the game across all platforms. There are several game mechanics that we want to make improvements on and are currently undergoing reviews on further optimizations that we can make as a whole. (despawning unclaimed drops over time as an example).

Thank you

David - Lead Programmer