Unreal Engine 5 Announced

As part of the announcement, “epics” showed a video demonstrating the capabilities of Unreal Engine 5 on PlayStation 5. The video was shot in real time on one of the available Epic Games devkits.

According to the press release, the video shows two key technologies of Unreal Engine 5.

• Nanite virtualizes any geometry without restrictions on detail. Thanks to this technology, developers will be able to directly import any art sources into the engine without having to think about the number of polygons involved.
• Lumen provides full-fledged global lighting, immediately reacting to any changes regarding the light on the stage. This tool removes the need to bake a light card. After the engine is released, developers will be able to see directly in the editor what the light will be in the game.

“Our goal is not just to expand the functionality of the engine for developers. Now the most difficult problem in game development is the creation of high—quality projects, because they require a lot of time and money. That’s why we want to make the developer’s life easier and more productive,” Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, said in an interview with The Verge. And he added: “Each generation of consoles posed new problems that you don’t have to worry about today. As for us, we are trying to solve the problem of content scalability in this generation.”

Unreal Engine 5 will be available as a preview version at the very beginning of January. The full launch will take place at the end of next year. It will support the next generation of consoles, the current generation of consoles, as well as PC, Mac, iOS and Android. The new engine will provide full backward compatibility with Unreal Engine 4.

On May 23, a free large-scale online meeting Unreal Meetup will be held under the auspices ofWargaming. It will be dedicated to working with the Epic Games engine. You can register here.