The story of how I got to where I am today
I've come a long way in 9+ years, how did I get here?
Welcome! I suppose introductions are in order. My name is Garrett. I am a Software Engineer and aspiring Game Developer.
How did I get here?
I have been programming for almost 9 years now.
What began as an interest in making Minecraft Server plugins, blossomed into deciding that programming was what I wanted to do as a career.
In those 9 or so years, as my video game interests shifted away from Minecraft, I found a new interest in Fortnite. When I first started playing, I just enjoyed the game for what it was, a Battle Royale. Little did I know, a few short months later, I'd discover what gave me a reason to keep looking forward to new updates: Datamining.
What is Datamining?
Datamining is when you look into the game files of a video game to extract information that's either unreleased or unknown. In the case of a live service game such as Fortnite, it was moreso the former that piqued my interest.
Beginning around mid-2020, I began really diving into how to datamine games, specifically Fortnite, which brought me to already-made tools, namely UEViewer and FModel. These tools provided a user-friendly way to view Unreal Engine files. Wanting to learn how these pieces of software worked was the main driving force behind advancing my programming knowledge.
Where to next?
After a bit of time, I decided I wanted to learn C# and contribute to the FModel project, headed by Valentin, more widely known online as Asval. At the start, I was like a floundering fish, annoying and asking dumb questions, but over time I began contributing meaningful code to the project.
Around the same time, I began developing a Discord Bot to automatically grab information from game files, and also from Epic endpoints that were being documented on GitHub by community members. That Fortnite Discord Bot, is Fortnite Central.
Fortnite Central
Fortnite Central image themed around the Multiverse theme following the release of Chapter 5: Season 1
Fortnite Central began as a bot, made in Java, on Discord, created to post in-game news updates, version changes, and new cosmetics in each update with a styled icon design. The bot grew steadily as I began growing by posting datamining finds on Twitter as updates released and slowly finding things that other dataminers did not find, and thus me being credited with the information. This continued on for a while, continually ruining my sleep schedule. I formed acquaintances with other dataminers, including my now longtime friend Ricky.
FModel Team
We now come to FModel 4. In the beginning of 2021, as a contributor to FModel, I was invited to help develop the new version of FModel, FModel 4, and its new Unreal Engine file parser, CUE4Parse. A lot of the groundwork had already been done for CUE4Parse, but there was still a road ahead for FModel 4, and necessary updates and upgrades to CUE4Parse. Through many exceptions and crashes, and a whole lot of boring feature porting from FModel 3, we finally launched FModel 4 and its parser to the public on May 22nd, 2021 (a day ahead of schedule 🎉).
Since then, FModel grew exponentially, being not only a datamining tool for Fortnite, but also any and all Unreal Engine 4 and 5 games. Games that had modified engine serialization code were reverse engineered, which gave me some knowledge I never would have thought of before without being on the team.
Disaster and Stupidity
Doing datamining and having discussions with Epic Games employees over specific things I had found over time, clouded my judgement, and I made the single worst mistake I could've made.
I was contacted by a dataminer I was familar with. They had someone contact them, that they had an Epic account that had permissions for a test version of Fortnite. Seeing as I had test versions of Fortnite pass through me a few times by that point, it didn't trigger any alarms for me. Ignorance is bliss... right...? Wrong! That in and of itself was not my main problem though. The dataminer provided me with a copy of the manifest for the game version, and an account token to log in. At the time, I was in the process of moving to prepare to begin college, so I suppose I either was too trigger happy or just overwhelmed, but I stupidly utilized that account token.
And that was the end. Shortly after this all went down, my account, and the other dataminer's account, were disabled. The Epic employees I had spoken to previously suddenly couldn't speak to me, and couldn't (or wouldn't) tell me what was happening. At the time, it was devistating. I actually physically stood up, and paced the hotel room I was in at the time, crying. Years of money, cosmetics, and time, gone. 🍃
Two years later
In the two years since then, I didn't have time to dwell on the consequences of my actions, because I was flung head first into accelerated college courses. The main Epic employee I hadn't had responses from started replying again to my progress updates, and all was well... Until, I got to courses which required Unreal Engine. Due to the nature of these courses, I had to utilize the build of Unreal Engine 5.4 from the Epic Games Launcher so my assets could be utilized by other members of my team. I still had access to the Unreal Engine source code repository on GitHub, so I cloned the closest build I could find, and keeping the Changelist versions the same, and all has worked well since (luckily).
Fortnite Central has kept running, but not to the degree it had been months or even years before. As I could no longer play the game it was for, the idea of spending time to update and maintain it became harder and harder to justify. I have kept it updated when something catastrophically breaks, but when something small changes, such as the blog post API for Fortnite's news page got updated, it just silently dies.
I no longer datamine Fortnite, or any game for that matter. I provide small fixes to FModel or CUE4Parse if I am aware of the problem and know the solution, but other than that I don't contribute to those projects either.
As of the writing of this blog post, it has been two years since the ban. I have recieved correspondance that my HackerOne account is now able to participate in Epic Games Bug Bounties again, but no sign of my Epic Games account being unbanned. I hope if an Epic employee reads this, first off, hello, second of all, I hope they see that I am not the same person I was two years ago. I hope they see that I've grown, done better things. I just want them to see that I want to build things, especially at Epic if given the opportunity.
Looking ahead
Looking ahead, I've started different projects such as:
Which are related to my passion and hobby of Pokemon Trading Cards. They've taught me about TypeScript and Frontend with React/Preact, NextJS, and so many other things I wouldn't have learned otherwise.
And my software company GenX Software which will house my developed games and projects.
I've even been accepted as a PlayStation Partner to be able to bring my game ideas to life on the modern PlayStation family of consoles!
That's all from me. I know I am missing things in the timeline, but I appreciate you, dear reader, for taking the time to read my story. If you'd like to reach out, please do.
Thank you, Garrett