Are your textures blocking your Island?

We hear YOU! Confusing error messages blocking your island from reaching the discovery page is frustrating, well we're here to help. This week we talk upload blocking textures, share some more data persistence knowledge and highlight a fresh Prop Hunt island!

September 19, 2024

News

Texture Sizes Could Be Blocking Your Island!

We often hear frustrations from Creators regarding the unclear, seemingly random, error messages they can receive when attempting to upload their island. Nothing could be more frustrating after months of hard work, than being tripped up at the final hurdle. So this week we wanted to highlight a potential cause of these upload blockers that might have flown under the radar, texture sizes!

Textures are vital for our islands and games in general, without them, it would be a very bland looking world, destined for the bottom of the Fortnite Discovery barrel. However they can be extremely costly for disk size and performance if not used correctly, which is why Fortnite blocks islands with incorrect textures.

A big culprit to the cost of texture sizes, is literally the size of the image!

The pixel dimensions for video game textures should always be a power of two! Unsure what sizes are power of two? Here’s a quick list of the most common texture sizes you would find in a production game and their use cases:

  • 64px X 64px (Perfect for small UI Icons)

  • 128px X 128px (Another great one for small to medium UI elements)

  • 256px X 256px (Largest of your UI/Hud elements, think Mini maps etc)

  • 512px X 512px (Great for a small prop texture)

  • 1024px X 1024px (Great for large prop or small tiling texture)

  • 2048px X 2048px (Great for a hero prop, character or key tiling texture, usually the most versatile size)

  • 4096px X 4069px (Kept exclusively for major hero, one off assets. Used unless absolutely necessary).

You don’t have to keep the textures square, you can mix and match for your needs! For example, a 256×512 or 1024×4096 is totally acceptable, but if they are off by just ONE pixel, there’s problems!

Beware to those who do not follow this rule, as UEFN’s auto checker looks for textures not using the power of two rule. If found, it will automatically stop your ground breaking, hardware destroying island from seeing the light of discovery.  

We wont go into the nitty gritty as to why power of two is important (This would be a long newsletter otherwise), Epic has for us!

Hit the button below to see the full write up about texture sizes and how to fix any textures that may not be correct!

If you were buried deep in your Verse coding last week, you may have missed our great interview with the developers of Mercenaries.

Check it out, its full of great insights.

Learning

Deep Diving into Persistence.. again?

In a previous newsletter, we highlighted a Youtube tutorial breaking down the basics of data persistence in UEFN. Well, it seems we were a week or two ahead of Epic as they have released a Developer Deep Dive into Persistence.

This video is AWESOME! It has some great explanations, verse scripts and demos, that highlight the techniques brilliantly with easy to understand explanations, supported by a dope track environment.


Players are looking for more complexity for their games, so lets bring it!

Spotlight of the week

Suburban Prop Hunt - Srioz

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Wondering how you can build on top of established game modes? Well Srioz did just that by adding fresh mechanics to the fan favorite, Prop Hunt. Being creative and adding small tweaks to tried and tested game modes, is still one of the best ways to gain more players and engagement, which is why we wanted to highlight this island and inspire our readers.

Prop players are built a little differently inside Suburban Prop Hunt. Players have access to a full catalog of both Fortnite and custom props to select and disguise themselves with. Most importantly though, players can arrange and place props within the level to create scenes that help build a more convincing hiding place. Fool hunters by building a well orchestrated, camouflage-ing, scene, or play a game of misdirection by creating obvious prop placed scenes, to draw their attention away from you! However you choose to play as a Prop Player, this small addition adds layers of creative options to keep you engaged.

Srioz also added CCTV and proximity chat features to help Hunter players as well. We really liked these changes to Prop Hunt and had a few ideas of our own such as, placeable booby traps and bounty rewards!

We’ve said it before, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, iterate and improve!

Have you created a great island and not getting enough players?

Subscribe to the newsletter and send in your Island! We would love to review and showcase your work!