Fortnite Player Mesh Optimisation

Fortnite is a game developed by Epic Games who created all versions of Unreal Engine. Fortnites battle royale mode drops 100 players onto a single island, which means that potentially every player one of these players could end up in a single location. This many high quality, fully animated, player controlled models is taxing for both CPU and GPU performance resources and could potentially result in large frame drops. In order to combat this Epic created what they call a significance manager that adjusts the fidelity of the other player characters models based on their “importance” based on 3 different criteria: the distance relative to the player characters position, the size of the screen and how visible the character is such as whether or not they are hidden behind geometry for instance. These factors will determine what priority bucket each player goes into with each bucket having a maximum cap to prevent too many high-fidelity models being put into the same bucket in the case that a large quantity of models meet the requirements of the higher tier of priority bucket. The size of these buckets is different for the various platforms Fornite appears on, for console the highest quality bucket can have 5 players in it whilst the mobile version only supports a single player in the high-quality bucket. This is a result of the hardware of the different platforms, mobile phones naturally have much weaker CPUs and GPUs than console due to the size of them and thusly would struggle displaying the same number of high quality models without significantly compromising the frame rate.