It was a bit of a shaky weekend for Epic and Fortnite Battle Royale with numerous periods of downtime or general matchmaking issues. The reason this happened was the volume of players as the game hit 811K players on Sunday.
Epic has apologised for the problems and they have also been taking a long look at Fortnite Battle Royale to find out what the major problems are including rubber banding. Epic is now planning to track more of the data such as server performance, client performance, tracking ping and packet loss per region.
As far as the what they are doing on the development site, where some code issues are causing problems, Epic posted a long list of what needs to be looked at. As the game is still in early access, none of the problems are unexpected. Since Fortnite Battle Royale launched for free, Epic has had to deal with a large influx of players in a short space of time. Epic is going to be tackling the following:
- Improve performance on min spec PC systems (Nvidia GTX 460, Radeon HD 5570, Intel HD 4000). This is an area where we made things worse recently, but took initial steps to correct in v1.8. We’re not going to stop there.
- Fix GPU hangs on PC and continue work with graphic card vendors such as NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel on improving performance and stability.
- Improve input latency on consoles. Improvements shipped with v1.8 — please let us know your thoughts.
- Continue our push on improving console performance. We track the percentage of missed VSYNCs and want to be at less than 2% of frames (barely) missing it.
- Reduce hitches during gameplay. We define a hitch as a frame that took more than 60 ms, resulting in an entire frame to be skipped. The goal here is to get to less than one per minute with focus on entirely eliminating hitches over 100 ms.
- Fix remaining hitches on dedicated servers. E.g. a lot of players jumping late can result in rubber banding for players early on.
- Optimize server performance of common actions like taking damage.
- Identify source of hitches that are limited to first hour of releasing an update.
- Optimize our server and network code to allow sending of player state to all 100 connections per frame. Right now we are updating 25 connections per frame in the lobby and 50 during the game. That means your play experience isn’t where we want it to be till there are 50 players left. This is a major change that is running in parallel with other optimizations.
- Improve our handling of edge cases that can result in wells of despair.
- Improve our matchmaking system to dynamically route traffic to data centers within a region based on location. Basically have the ability to optimize for ping without taking away from the ability to play with friends.
- Hire more smart people that are passionate about these sorts of technical challenges.
