Since early last month, the mobile world have been agog about arrival of Fortnite to Android and in less than a month, it has already exploded in popularity, hitting a record 15 million downloads despite not yet being officially released on Google Play Store.
Although the iconic game is still on invite-only stage, it has managed to attract 23 million players with 15 million downloading it to their devices.
In a blog post, Fortnite game developers, Epic Games, details the efforts made to bring the game to Android. It seems Samsung worked closely with them to optimize the game for their devices even sending their own team of engineers to assist in the process.
"Samsung sent engineers to multiple Epic offices worldwide and worked directly with our engineers on optimisations and performance analysis, and contributed many code changes especially for the Vulkan renderer. Using instrumented test phones and their in-house engineering tools, they were able to give us insight into what our performance and memory bottlenecks were and how to address them."
Apart from its initial partnership with Samsung, Epic Games also seem to have worked with Google in optimizing Fortnite for the Android, as were other partners such as ARM, Qualcomm, Imagination Technologies, Razer, and Huawei's HiSilicon.
"Google engineers also visited us on-site to profile and optimize Fortnite, helping us to identify key optimizations, a memory leak, and also to work out a solid frame pacing implementation for OpenGL on Android. The Android engineers at Google are very talented and passionate about making the Android ecosystem awesome for gaming and constantly improving it.
"In addition, we’ve been able to work with numerous other partners to test and optimize Fortnite including ARM, Qualcomm, Imagination Technologies, Razer, HiSilicon, and many others."
The post also touch on issues of fragmentation which has been a problem for Android developers for quite some time. Epic Games seems pleasantly surprised to see devices that are up to two years and that meets the system requirements for playing Fortnite game doing well with it. Apparently, 92 percent of Fortnite users are on Android 8.0 Oreo, while roughly eight percent are running Android 7.0 Nougat , and less than 0.5 percent are on a version of Android released in 2015 or earlier.
"To manage this complexity, we use the hierarchical device profile system in Unreal Engine. We start by creating four performance profiles: Low, Mid, High, and Epic. These profiles adjust scalability settings in the engine to allow the game to run on devices with different performance characteristics. Low pulls in view distances as far as possible and disables all optional graphics features. Epic has everything turned on: shadows, foliage, and the farthest view distance that can run on the latest devices."
Since Fortnite for Android is yet to be available on Google Play Store, there's increased chances of malware being circulated in the form of fake Fortnite apps. To prevent this from happening, Epic Games has set up a dedicated internal team tasked with policing these sites and has hired a third-party IP and anti-fraud enforcement agency to take down sites that claim to offer Fortnite downloads. To date, Epic has taken down 47 of these sites.
"We proactively search for new malware sites as they pop up with an internal team dedicated to this task. In addition, we have also hired a third party IP and anti- fraud enforcement agency to expand our policing efforts. This partnership allows us to detect and monitor new domains that are registered with suspicious URLs so that if they evolve into malicious sites, Epic can take appropriate action up to and including litigation."
You can head to Epic Game’s site Here and read the full post on the release of Fortnite for Android.
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