How to build a live concert in Fortnite

Island Settings decides how people move before, during and after the show. Get it right first, because every rehearsal from here on depends on it. The Details panel labels don't always match the underlying property names, which matters the moment you search for a setting.

Fortnite calls stamina Energy internally. Searching for "stamina" finds nothing.

The show is triggered by a countdown to a wall-clock time. GetSecondsSinceEpoch() gives you UTC, and converting your local announced time into it is your job. There is no timezone or daylight-saving support in Verse.

A fixed offset constant is only correct for half the year. Put it at the top of the file, comment it loudly, and put a reminder in your calendar for each clock change.

# Amsterdam: 1 in winter, 2 during summer time.
# No automatic DST -- this gets flipped by hand at each clock change.
TimeZoneOffsetHours : int = 2

Every enabled Player Spawner is a candidate for both initial spawn and respawn. The moment you place a second one anywhere in the level, it starts catching ordinary spawns. And a newly placed spawner is enabled by default.

The pattern: give the show a dedicated spawner, Disable() it in OnBegin, and swap enabled state on both sides when the show starts and ends. World spawners off and venue spawner on at show start; the reverse at the end.

Use one Audio Player device per track rather than one long mix, so cues can start and stop individual songs. Then turn on the one setting that matters: syncPlayerAudio. It is off by default.

Without it, a track started at minute two is simply not playing for anyone who arrives at minute three. They don't get a late start, they get silence for the rest of the song. That covers latecomers, reconnects and anyone who respawns, which is how it usually gets discovered: someone dies during a show and the music is gone for them.

Show lighting is Customizable Light devices, switched with TurnOn() and TurnOff(). You will drag dozens of them into cue arrays by hand in step 7, and naming is the difference between twenty minutes and an afternoon.

Name them by position and subject: Key_Left_Vocalist, not Light12.

A Post Process device per look (BlendInForAll(), BlendOutForAll() from Verse). Tuning looks by running the whole show each time is painfully slow. Instead, wire a spare Button's interact event straight to the device's Enable For All and Blend In For All in the Details panel. Walk up, press it, see the look.

Model the show as an array of <concrete> cue structs. Each holds a timestamp plus everything that fires at it: tracks to start, lights to switch, the look to blend in. One loop sleeps the gap between cues. People who don't write code can then author the whole show in the Details panel.

Keep the end of the show as its own field. The last cue firing and the performance finishing are different moments.

# After the last cue: wait out the rest of the show,
# measured from ShowDurationSeconds -- NOT from the cue list.
RemainingSeconds := ShowDurationSeconds - ElapsedSeconds
if (RemainingSeconds > 0.0):
    Sleep(RemainingSeconds)
OnShowEnd()

Place a prop as a marker where people should land, then move every player to its transform. Do the same in reverse at the end, with a marker in the world.

TeleportEveryoneTo(Marker : creative_prop) : void =
    Where := Marker.GetTransform()
    for (Player : GetPlayspace().GetPlayers()):
        # Fails silently for anyone mid-respawn or with a network blip.
        if (Char := Player.GetFortCharacter[]):
            if (Char.TeleportTo[Position := Where.Translation, Rotation := Where.Rotation]) {}

If the world has Beacons (for resource nodes, for example), they will be pointing players out of the venue mid-show. Hide them. But a background loop that manages them will re-enable them a few seconds later, and the bug looks random. A flag checked inside the loop beats trying to kill the loop.

In the downloads this is already done: plain beacons go in concert_manager's HideBeacons list, and dropper_manager (tutorial 03) hides its own beacons when its HideMarkersTrigger fires. This is the pattern inside it:

var SuppressMarkers : logic = false

SetMarkersHidden(Hidden : logic) : void =
    set SuppressMarkers = Hidden
    if (Hidden = true):
        for (Node : Nodes):
            Node.Beacon.Disable()
    else:
        for (Idx -> Node : Nodes):
            if (IsActive(Idx) = true):
                Node.Beacon.Enable()

# ...and inside the rotation loop:
if (SuppressMarkers = false):
    Node.Beacon.Enable()

A Cinematic Sequence device plays the flythrough (Play(), then StoppedEvent.Await() to continue after it). The fix nobody finds alone: World Partition streams the world in around the player pawn, not around the camera. A camera that flies away from the audience shows empty terrain, because nothing asked those cells to load.

Add a WorldPartitionStreamingSourceComponent to the Cine Camera Actor: