Fortnite Chapter 4 Season 1

THE FIRST CHAPTER IN THE NEW GENERATION OF FORTNITE TECH

Falcon Scout

The Falcon Scout is a remote-controlled recon Drone introduced in Fortnite Season 23. It has a variety of functonality:

Enable rapid prototyping while ensuring that strong architectural and algorithmic decisions are made.
Evangelizing new and better systems in a fast paced environment without affecting implementation speeds.
Able to give actionable feedback on new systems not only from a programmer’s perspective (architecture, optimization, etc) but also from a user’s perspective.
Willing to use and deep dive into new tech without any guidance to prove it before it is used by a wider array of people.
Strong design sense, being able to closely work with design to define the gameplay and feel of a feature that’s very different from its predecessors.

Duration :

One of the most technically challenging features of season 23, with most of the work revolving around:

Movement Simulation and network prediction.
Simulated Proxy “Simulation”, effectively bypassing engine mechanics not compatible with Fortnite (Possession/De-possession), enabling us to fake possession.
Heavy HUD Engineering work, successfully decoupling UI code from Gameplay code
Adopted new Engine Technologies like Enhanced Input as the first user in the Fortnite context, which led me to work closely with the engine team to solidify and evolve the tech to suit the game’s needs as it was being dog-fooded by the Falcon
Used base engine classes to build a Fortnite Item without all the tech debt coming from Fort-level classes, encouraging componentization and modularity.