15 ms·

Unreal Engine 5 is now available

328 points by laurencei 5y ago

FloatArtifact 5y ago
how moddable is unreal engine without express support of the developers of a given title?
- Hir0ki 5y ago
  Not very moddable at all. I tried to go down that rabbit hole once, but i didn't find any guides on how to do it. The best stuff i could find are for hacking it and not modding. On most modding comunities they tell you to stay away from it. Some usefull tools i found: https://github.com/panzi/u4pak https://github.com/panzi/u4pak This is used to unpack the game files. https://www.gildor.org/en/projects/umodel https://www.gildor.org/en/projects/umodel with this tool you can view some models and other assets in the game files.
ThrowawayR2 5y ago
Perhaps it was just a forlorn hope but an announcement of the UE4 tech demo of Unreal Tournament 4 updated for UE5 would have been nice.
- snarfy 5y ago
  They crapped all over their community so much I have little faith. We basically finished UT4 for them and they wouldn't even merge the changes in.
  - unethical_ban 5y ago
    Any details? I haven't followed UT in some years and wonder if a "community edition" exists.
    - snarfy 5y ago
      UT4 is still a free game with some community content. With no scripting support, adding content like vehicles is pretty much impossible. Blueprints are not sufficient for such a task. A few people implemented them but requires C++ and the game doesn't support downloadable c++ mods. The C++ mods would have needed to be incorporated into the native side of the game but it never came. There is enough content there collectively for a new game but it would need Epic to lead the way. It's a bit too late now for that. I play UT4 and UT2004 and UT2004 has a bigger community today, 16 years later, than UT4 does.
      - unethical_ban 5y ago
        Gotcha. I'm going to a LAN party this weekend and was wondering if it would be worth it for the gang to install... otherwise we'll end up playing a few hours of UT2k4 ONS-RedPlanet with the extended vehicles mod.
        jcelerier 5y ago
        the time I spent on ONS-Valarna and RedPlanet... thanks for the good memories and have fun !
    - ohgodplsno 5y ago
      There was a community led Unreal Tournament working in collaboration with Epic, but it's basically been abandoned.
- Stevvo 5y ago
  There is an Unreal-like game called Lyra included. It's pretty barebones as it's intended for developers rather than players. The gameplay loop is actually pretty tight and rewarding.
MBCook 5y ago
I wonder when the first UE5 based games will be released. I can’t wait.
- dhritzkiv 5y ago
  While more of a tech demo than a game, there was "The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience"[1] that came out in mid December. It's free on the latest gen consoles. [1] https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/wakeup https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/wakeup
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    Man that uncanny valley keeps getting uncannier. I wonder why not PC.
    - unixhero 5y ago
      Corporate captive consumer strategy approach.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Which PC hardware setup? There is a reason why game studios love consoles so much. It is mostly the same during 5 years.
    - terafo 5y ago
      Because that was alpha version of an engine and it is far easier to ship demo to three SKUs than to a limitless permutations of PCs(and you shouldn't forget that most PCs won't be able to run this with adequate performance). Matrix Demo is available as UE5 project right now and you can download it and build it(it weighs 90 gigs though).
- yazaddaruvala 5y ago
  Fortnite has been using UE5 for a few months now. Although I’m sure there could be a better display of the technology.
snarfy 5y ago
No mention of Verse script.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  This was disappointing. But I have hope
drak0n1c 5y ago
The keynote presentation that came out today covers all the new features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZLibi6s_ew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZLibi6s_ew
dummydata 5y ago
Did they ever get around to building a stable OpenXR toolkit? It seemed like an afterthought last time I checked..
- ChikkaChiChi 5y ago
  Anything specific that isn't working for you? I've had great luck with it.
fuckcensorship 5y ago
> First off, there’s Lumen—a fully dynamic global illumination solution that enables you to create believable scenes where indirect lighting adapts on the fly to changes to direct lighting or geometry—for example, changing the sun’s angle with the time of day, turning on a flashlight, or opening an exterior door. With Lumen, you no longer have to author lightmap UVs, wait for lightmaps to bake, or place reflection captures; you can simply create and edit lights inside the Unreal Editor and see the same final lighting your players will see when the game or experience is run on the target platform. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this basically a software-based implementation of NVIDIA's hardware-based RTX?
- Melatonic 5y ago
  Sounds like they have finally put in Global Illum - catching up to what CryEngine had years and years ago Unreal is really starting to actually be the best of the best
  - vhgyu75e6u 5y ago
    Unreal was already the best engine purely on being easy to work with, support from third party programs and community, none of those things can be said about CryEngine.
- ericlewis 5y ago
  I would be surprised if it didn’t require an RTX to be useful.
  - tedunangst 5y ago
    The PS5 demo looked useful.
    - terafo 5y ago
      PS5 demo did have hardware ray-tracing acceleration though.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
I only play with game dev at a hobby level, so can someone help me understand if nanite is an automatic LoD solution?
- rflec028 5y ago
  Yes.
- teraflop 5y ago
  Yes, that's essentially what it is. It runs a preprocessing step on meshes to generate a hierarchical LOD structure, and then at runtime it uses a custom software rasterizer running on the GPU(!) to dynamically render whatever level of detail is appropriate. The term "virtualized" in the description indicates that chunks of geometry are fetched on demand (analogously to virtual memory), rather than loading the entire fully-detailed mesh up front. The biggest limitation is that Nanite currently only supports rigid, non-deformable meshes, so it's mainly intended for scenery rather than characters.
  - scotty79 5y ago
    What about the meshes deformed/animated by the vertex shader?
    - teraflop 5y ago
      To be honest, I'm not sure. I watched the Nanite tech talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMorJX3Nj6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMorJX3Nj6U) because I find graphics technology fascinating, but I don't have any experience actually using Unreal Engine. My understanding is that the Nanite renderer completely bypasses the normal shader pipeline, and therefore deformation using vertex shaders isn't supported. This doesn't mean you can't have deformable meshes in your scene -- they just have to be rendered in a separate pass that doesn't use Nanite.
      - ChikkaChiChi 5y ago
        This is how I understand it as well. Currently, you can think about it like those old cartoons where parts of the background that were to be interacted with were a slightly different color to help the animators know what they had to work with. Since we are so early in the stages of Nanite tech, I expect UE6 will tout some sort of deferred and active Nanite rendering to allow for handoff for deformation.
ladyattis 5y ago
The Matrix demo is close but the facial expressions are still a bit off like the person who's doing mocap is wearing a mask even if they're not. It'll be quite interesting when they finally get those issues resolved and when developers also try to make more unreal (pun intended) looking effects that interact more with realistic looking settings or characters. Having the freedom to make such a disjointed thing in a 3d renderer like how surrealists use to do with oil paints and the like it something underutilized in cinema and games imo.
- psyc 5y ago
  Horizon Zero Dawn has the best facial expressions I’ve seen yet. First I noticed the lip synching was very good. Then I noticed it also seemed to be doing procedural micro expressions as well as small eye saccades. Paired with subtle and expressive voice acting it’s remarkable.
  - cloogshicer 5y ago
    Are you being serious? Don't get me wrong, HZD is an amazing game, but man the faces are absolute robots. That's not the team's fault though - any open world game with lots of dialogue will pale in comparison to hand animated faces.
    - psyc 5y ago
      I’d be happy to view video from a game you think does it better. Also see my other reply.
      - vvillena 5y ago
        Uncharted 4 comes to mind: https://youtu.be/KdDHJnqS32E https://youtu.be/KdDHJnqS32E That said, I agree eye movement is a great way to convey feeling, and Horizon Zero Dawn did it well (and its DLC even better). Yakuza 0 is another example of doing a good job. The exagerated animation style also shows in the characters' eye movements. A great sample is this sequence that, very conveniently, shows a blind character that lacks eye expression. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfVqfelfYHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfVqfelfYHo
unixhero 5y ago
I am thinking of changing careers because of this engine and this release - so that I can use it to solve things. Very excited to learn it.
yodon 5y ago
Has anyone spotted discussion of WebGL render targets? UE4 could target WebGL but for UE5 I'm just finding a few hobby/fanboy forum posts not anything official from Unreal.
- imachine1980_ 5y ago
  Conjecture 1) unreal is overkill for web and I feel ue5 is more, you can make a 500mb web game, but I don't play it 2) web makes no money, except in China, but point 1 still applies
- lfowles 5y ago
  The HTML5 target has been deprecated for several versions now.
- programmarchy 5y ago
  As mentioned, official support was dropped and the community supported extension hasn't been updated in ~2 years. If you need to target WebGL, then Unity is a better bet.
  - throwaway675309 5y ago
    Unities web GL export has been in an experimental state for years now.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Even Unity isn't much better, the only good ones are the engines designed for Web specially like PlayCanvas and BabylonJS.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  You are better off with PlayCanvas and BabylonJS. WebGL 2.0 is stuck in 2011 hardware, something like Unreal is overkill. No wonder they decided to use pixel streaming with server side rendering instead.
- astlouis44 5y ago
  Our venture backed startup is actively working on integrating web support back into Unreal Engine, as we see a huge opportunity for a easy cross-platform export target for developers. We're working on a WebGPU backend right now for both UE4 and UE5, and have already upgraded UE4 to support WebGL 2.0 from 4.24-4.27, as support for HTML5 was removed back in the 4.23 release. Another major innovation is we've imported a more improved compression format (Basis) as part of our pipeline, we've also created an asynchronous set fetching that only grabs the required data that a user needs to see at any given moment, streaming the rest of the assets in the background as necessary. This dramatically reduces load times, which was one of the biggest complaints with Unreal on the web previously. Website for more info - https://theimmersiveweb.com/ https://theimmersiveweb.com/ Our Discord: https://discord.gg/cFJV6Yu https://discord.gg/cFJV6Yu
dom96 5y ago
Brilliant! I've been waiting for them to release this together with the Matrix sample. It looks like they have done so but have stripped a lot of the Matrix-specific assets.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
oneoff786 5y ago
Congratulations epic games team. Extremely impressive. Can’t wait to update
Animats 5y ago
Nice. Now to download and wait out the hours-long build. The city from the Matrix demo is available for download. I want to try that.
- Animats 5y ago
  Now to download and wait out the hours-long build. Now building module 524 of 3998... Inevitably, the Windows build is a download via a provided launcher, and the Linux build is getting the sources from Github, searching forums for the directions, and compiling for hours. Supposedly Nanite will work in Linux in the release version; it didn't in the pre-release.
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
This sort of engine is a vast new vista of computing possibilities- apart from games and films, the opportunities for such 3D environments in many businesses is large (maybe huge!) So as someone who has never touched game dev, what is the learning curve like - exponential? What is "basic competence" once past "hello world"? Thanks :-)
- oneoff786 5y ago
  A lot of it is learning the engine api and how different parts interact. The basic competence level requires a pretty large body of knowledge. Can you, for example, Extend a character class, give it a skeleton, an animation blueprint with some animation states that read the character state, hook it up to player inputs, make it do some sounds, and add a bit of flair to some actions it can take? Can you build a basic ai behavior tree? Run some line traces to interact with colliders so your guy can interact with an object? Shoot a gun and spawn some bullets that can damage another unit? Etc.
  - tomatowurst 5y ago
    You absolutely need those basic skills to be in a position to produce anything on Unreal Engine but its the sheer amount of work that comes after to produce anything of value is where the challenge is in my opinion. It almost certainly involves a dedicated asset generation capacity to generate enough novelty and/or a polished, smooth mechanic that can handle all the edge cases thrown at it. And there's a reason why the UE tools out of the box are so limited and frustrating to use to the point that its impossible to work on anything without opening up your wallet to purchase productivity tools sold on its marketplace and still struggle with the workload. Especially when it requires you to become proficient at C++ because blueprint's value drops outside animation rigging and VFX, both of which Unity's 3rd party marketplace tools have filled rendering UE's initial user friendliness nil. You are stuck with an enterprise tool marketed and suited for large studios but you thought you could make indie games faster than Unity.
    - oneoff786 5y ago
lvl102 5y ago
If Epic were public, I’d park all of my retirement funds in there. I’ve watched this UE5 development and actively developed in it as a non-gaming dev! They’re thinking 5-10 years ahead.
- ChikkaChiChi 5y ago
  In 10 years, I think we'll all be using 3D engines like this to develop everything the same way 3D cards were once for gaming/animation only. The tooling has demanded so much and Unreal has pretty much nailed it. If they can make their engine more generalized, it's going to become a killer app.
  - lvl102 5y ago
    In 10 years, I’d imagine you can create an all digital movie or a game within days. Simply by typing a few descriptive words.
    - tomatowurst 5y ago
      Post-NeRF world: Google Maps and Waymo would've mapped the entire world, every city, road, terrain, crowd everything you can think of with any range of artistic tones, lighting, weather effects. It would be just a matter of paying Google a license fee to use their environment in a film or games. "Hey Google, generate a GTA V clone with cel-shading located in Liberia with Final Fantasy 7 characters but not enough to infringe on US copyright laws." "Sure, here is the link you can share or the downloadable executable to submit to Steam" "Good, you go ahead and submit that to Steam and let me know when it hits 10,000 downloads"
  - terafo 5y ago
    You should note that I'm an amateur that toys with different game engines from time to time, but I don't think that any of their competitors is even close to be able to catch up with UE even if they have 10 years(not talking about current state of UE, but about state of UE 10 years from now). Unity does have some nice ECS things going, but overall their tech isn't good(prime reason why is that they don't make games, they make engine). Main branch of CryEngine is dead as engine that anyone aside from CryTek is using, but Amazon invests a lot into their fork(but it lacks vision TBH). Godot is good for 2d, but they aren't really going for that kind of experience.
tezza 5y ago
“Large World Coordinates (LWC)” - fantastic. My projects use Unity and any time the camera gets 1800m from the world (0,0,0) the camera begins to shake. By 2000m the shake is too violent to use. So you have to reset the coordinates by a hack if you want a world scale 1:1 map
- imnotlost 5y ago
  I just created a new scene in Unity 2020.3.5 and terrain going out to 6000 and a simple camera fly-script to fly around and it all looks good to me - no shaking. Using 32-bit floating point you'll have 0.1 accuracy up to 100000 at least. Edit - I just realized 10cm accuracy is not great (and that I'm talking to myself) so I tested with 0.001 and that's stable up to 9000.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  Ue4 used to rely on the world origin shifting hack too. But this has significant problems, especially in multiplayer.
- jrootabega 5y ago
  I've been working with Unity with the intention of making a large open world, and so this was one of the things I deliberately experimented with and tried to quantify. I found I had to be several orders of magnitude farther from the origin to notice stuff like that, and frankly I was a little disappointed that it was so hard to reproduce. Is there a sample project or description you could share that would help people observe that? I would not be surprised if certain circumstances other than purely distance make it worse. For example, when I traveled large distances solely on the world X axis, I saw my meshes quiver only when the camera was also aligned on/orthogonal to the X axis (don't remember which one exactly.)
ChicagoBoy11 5y ago
Can someone that has experience with Unreal Engine give some sort of approximation of what is required to sort of achieve minimum competency as a developer in it? Like, with web stuff, you can get up and running fairly quickly and slowly scaffold your way to more intricate projects... can the same be done with something like this or is the initial learning curve a bit steeper?
- snarfy 5y ago
  There is a learning curve but it's not too bad. It took me about 6 months to go from zero experience to winning prizes in their 'make something unreal' contest for unreal engine 3. If you have any development experience it should go pretty fast.
- lazypenguin 5y ago
  Yes, unreal is quite easy to get started in. You start with a scaffolding immediately when you start a new project. It literally has template options for different game types. It’s very friendly to artists as nearly all the art tools are gui driven. Blueprints are okay, I didn’t love them for all things but for a lot of things it was okay. Code is harder, you have to read their implementations of things if you want to do anything sufficiently complex. There’s not a lot of comprehensive technical material for the internals. Using unreal engine as a programmer feels like the using “enterprise” software in terms of scale and bloat except that it was built by seriously competent engineers.
  - realusername 5y ago
    That's kind of the issue I have with those engines as a programmer not coming from games. Is there any good engine made for programmers? A kind of "bootstrap" of video games?
    - ThalesX 5y ago
      > Is there any good engine made for programmers? A kind of "bootstrap" of video games? There's so many starter kits out there, for Unity at least, even for older platforms such as Ogre3D and SDL, that I think the highest barrier of entry for any programmer is the fun idea.
ChikkaChiChi 5y ago
The Quixel integration is going to help devs quickly build out gorgeous concepts. It will also usher in a new era of asset flippers building garbage that also looks beautiful.
lbj 5y ago
Just amazing what these guys can do. The UE team and the Nvidia guys are doing 99% of the interesting work in graphics these days.
Stevvo 5y ago
From an art workflow perspective nothing even comes close. Just put down your models in the scene, place the lights and your done. All the additional scene setup and art passes that are no longer required really set artists free to actually work on the art instead of optimization and fake lighting. No baking lightmaps, no baking LODs, no hours spent placing 'fake lights' to simulate GI.
Jyaif 5y ago
The matrix demo project requires 100GB of disk space! While uninstalling games to free up space to download the project, I noticed that there was no correlation between a game's disk space usage and the amount of fun it provided.
- drusepth 5y ago
  With cloud gaming gaining in popularity at the same time asset detail/sizes are ballooning in size, it certainly feels like we're now ~1-2 generations away from games/experiences being so large most people won't bother installing them locally.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    That is why cloud companies are now also offering game development workflows completly based on their platforms.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  Would raw project files be larger than a compiled game? I assume yes. I’m not sure by how much.
  - stonith 5y ago
    By an absolute bucketload. Valley of the Ancients was a 100GB project that went down to 25GB packaged if I remember correctly.
    - oneoff786 5y ago
      Sounds like a smaller drop than I would have expected tbh. Valley was pretty short. Is a large game of that detail really possible to ship with sane size requirements?
xmly 5y ago
Unreal or Unity, which one is easier for a programmer with zero experience on 3D gaming creation.
- dafelst 5y ago
  I use Unreal in my day job and I am very familiar with it, and I found it much more difficult to learn and operate than Unity. Even as an Unreal "expert", for personal projects I still use Unity, it is just much easier to get stuff up and running and iterate.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  I found Unity to be easier to start with but led to a lot of garbage. Unreal has a steeper initial learning curve but the system itself is more pleasant and the built in components are much more helpful. I switched to unreal after a couple years of Unity and strongly advocate others to do the same.
- mbrodersen 5y ago
  Definitely Unity.
rudedogg 5y ago
What are your options for creating addons/plugins for Unreal Engine? Do they have to be written in C++?
- tomatowurst 5y ago
  Pretty much. It's not for everyone but here's the nice thing about Unreal: If you pay for it using Paypal and it turns out the plugin is not as described, you can get your money back. Good luck of that ever happening with Unity. I was promised refund by Unity support for a totally non-responsive and outdated plugin that was on sale. They delayed and delayed until I could no longer get a refund. Having said that I do not recommend Unreal Engine for solo indie development but Unity also feels weird with confusion around which version you need to start with, DOTs etc. Unity seems like it is it for indie developers but its increasingly a cluttered landscape with lot of shoddy plugins
tehnub 5y ago
Nice announcement, but I really can't wait for an Apple Silicon build of the Engine. Would love to develop games on an M1 device.
- andreasley 5y ago
  The release notes [1] state that "preliminary support for native Apple Silicon for macOS targets" has been added. Also, there's now an "Import Xcode GPU Debugger Plugin for Mac". [1] https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/unreal-engine-5_0-release-notes/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/unreal-engine-5_0-re...
  - tehnub 5y ago
    I may be wrong, but I think that is talking about creating games that run on Apple Silicon, not building the editor/engine itself for Apple Silicon (i.e. the dev setup). Regarding the XCode GPU plugin, that is cool; didn't see that, thanks!
    - andreasley 5y ago
      Actually: - Epic Launcher is using Rosetta - Unreal Editor is using Rosetta (first launch took an hour or two, maxing out one core only) - ShaderCompileWorker is using Rosetta - Packaged project for macOS is using Rosetta So I'm not quite sure what they're talking about.
      - tehnub 5y ago
        Yeah, at least it’s all working via Rosetta. When I first got my 13in MBP when it came out, I couldn’t get it to compile at all. The editor runs pretty well actually. I did an unreal 5 build, and it was a bit laggy, but if you turn off Lumen and TSR for the viewport renderer, it’s a lot better. It’s definitely usable under Rosetta, but native would surely be a lot better.
NWoodsman 5y ago
What is the profit model driving the development of this engine? How do they make it free?
- maverickmax90 5y ago
  Free for studios earning < some $$$ and a "x%" cut for studios that earn > some $$$
scotty79 5y ago
I'm confused. I downloaded UE5. Created starter fpp project. Built it and ran it as standalone onn dx12. Switched to fullscreen, showed fps counter (120fps on 120hz oled tv) but the "game" doesn't feel like 120fps. It feels like at most 60. And before I turned off motion blur it was really smudgy and after I turned if it's really choppy. What's happening?
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  Can be a few things, but a lack of mouse input smoothing can be a culprit. If the viewport angle is "locked" to the mouse input ticks, it can display at effectively 60 Hz, where you'll get two identical frames per mouse movement. So 120 Hz of graphics, but 60 Hz of content.
  - scotty79 5y ago
    Does mouse give input at 60Hz in UE5 by default? On the windows desktop my mouse cursor movers definitely at 120Hz rate on this TV.

328 points by laurencei 5y ago

FloatArtifact 5y ago

how moddable is unreal engine without express support of the developers of a given title?

Hir0ki 5y ago
Not very moddable at all. I tried to go down that rabbit hole once, but i didn't find any guides on how to do it. The best stuff i could find are for hacking it and not modding. On most modding comunities they tell you to stay away from it. Some usefull tools i found: https://github.com/panzi/u4pak https://github.com/panzi/u4pak This is used to unpack the game files. https://www.gildor.org/en/projects/umodel https://www.gildor.org/en/projects/umodel with this tool you can view some models and other assets in the game files.

ThrowawayR2 5y ago

Perhaps it was just a forlorn hope but an announcement of the UE4 tech demo of Unreal Tournament 4 updated for UE5 would have been nice.

snarfy 5y ago
They crapped all over their community so much I have little faith. We basically finished UT4 for them and they wouldn't even merge the changes in.
- unethical_ban 5y ago
  Any details? I haven't followed UT in some years and wonder if a "community edition" exists.
  - snarfy 5y ago
    UT4 is still a free game with some community content. With no scripting support, adding content like vehicles is pretty much impossible. Blueprints are not sufficient for such a task. A few people implemented them but requires C++ and the game doesn't support downloadable c++ mods. The C++ mods would have needed to be incorporated into the native side of the game but it never came. There is enough content there collectively for a new game but it would need Epic to lead the way. It's a bit too late now for that. I play UT4 and UT2004 and UT2004 has a bigger community today, 16 years later, than UT4 does.
    - unethical_ban 5y ago
      Gotcha. I'm going to a LAN party this weekend and was wondering if it would be worth it for the gang to install... otherwise we'll end up playing a few hours of UT2k4 ONS-RedPlanet with the extended vehicles mod.
      - jcelerier 5y ago
        the time I spent on ONS-Valarna and RedPlanet... thanks for the good memories and have fun !
  - ohgodplsno 5y ago
    There was a community led Unreal Tournament working in collaboration with Epic, but it's basically been abandoned.
Stevvo 5y ago
There is an Unreal-like game called Lyra included. It's pretty barebones as it's intended for developers rather than players. The gameplay loop is actually pretty tight and rewarding.

MBCook 5y ago

I wonder when the first UE5 based games will be released. I can’t wait.

dhritzkiv 5y ago
While more of a tech demo than a game, there was "The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience"[1] that came out in mid December. It's free on the latest gen consoles. [1] https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/wakeup https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/wakeup
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  Man that uncanny valley keeps getting uncannier. I wonder why not PC.
  - unixhero 5y ago
    Corporate captive consumer strategy approach.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Which PC hardware setup? There is a reason why game studios love consoles so much. It is mostly the same during 5 years.
  - terafo 5y ago
    Because that was alpha version of an engine and it is far easier to ship demo to three SKUs than to a limitless permutations of PCs(and you shouldn't forget that most PCs won't be able to run this with adequate performance). Matrix Demo is available as UE5 project right now and you can download it and build it(it weighs 90 gigs though).
yazaddaruvala 5y ago
Fortnite has been using UE5 for a few months now. Although I’m sure there could be a better display of the technology.

snarfy 5y ago

No mention of Verse script.

oneoff786 5y ago
This was disappointing. But I have hope

drak0n1c 5y ago

The keynote presentation that came out today covers all the new features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZLibi6s_ew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZLibi6s_ew

dummydata 5y ago

Did they ever get around to building a stable OpenXR toolkit? It seemed like an afterthought last time I checked..

ChikkaChiChi 5y ago
Anything specific that isn't working for you? I've had great luck with it.

fuckcensorship 5y ago

> First off, there’s Lumen—a fully dynamic global illumination solution that enables you to create believable scenes where indirect lighting adapts on the fly to changes to direct lighting or geometry—for example, changing the sun’s angle with the time of day, turning on a flashlight, or opening an exterior door. With Lumen, you no longer have to author lightmap UVs, wait for lightmaps to bake, or place reflection captures; you can simply create and edit lights inside the Unreal Editor and see the same final lighting your players will see when the game or experience is run on the target platform. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this basically a software-based implementation of NVIDIA's hardware-based RTX?

Melatonic 5y ago
Sounds like they have finally put in Global Illum - catching up to what CryEngine had years and years ago Unreal is really starting to actually be the best of the best
- vhgyu75e6u 5y ago
  Unreal was already the best engine purely on being easy to work with, support from third party programs and community, none of those things can be said about CryEngine.
ericlewis 5y ago
I would be surprised if it didn’t require an RTX to be useful.
- tedunangst 5y ago
  The PS5 demo looked useful.
  - terafo 5y ago
    PS5 demo did have hardware ray-tracing acceleration though.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

I only play with game dev at a hobby level, so can someone help me understand if nanite is an automatic LoD solution?

rflec028 5y ago
Yes.
teraflop 5y ago
Yes, that's essentially what it is. It runs a preprocessing step on meshes to generate a hierarchical LOD structure, and then at runtime it uses a custom software rasterizer running on the GPU(!) to dynamically render whatever level of detail is appropriate. The term "virtualized" in the description indicates that chunks of geometry are fetched on demand (analogously to virtual memory), rather than loading the entire fully-detailed mesh up front. The biggest limitation is that Nanite currently only supports rigid, non-deformable meshes, so it's mainly intended for scenery rather than characters.
- scotty79 5y ago
  What about the meshes deformed/animated by the vertex shader?
  - teraflop 5y ago
    To be honest, I'm not sure. I watched the Nanite tech talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMorJX3Nj6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMorJX3Nj6U) because I find graphics technology fascinating, but I don't have any experience actually using Unreal Engine. My understanding is that the Nanite renderer completely bypasses the normal shader pipeline, and therefore deformation using vertex shaders isn't supported. This doesn't mean you can't have deformable meshes in your scene -- they just have to be rendered in a separate pass that doesn't use Nanite.
    - ChikkaChiChi 5y ago
      This is how I understand it as well. Currently, you can think about it like those old cartoons where parts of the background that were to be interacted with were a slightly different color to help the animators know what they had to work with. Since we are so early in the stages of Nanite tech, I expect UE6 will tout some sort of deferred and active Nanite rendering to allow for handoff for deformation.

ladyattis 5y ago

The Matrix demo is close but the facial expressions are still a bit off like the person who's doing mocap is wearing a mask even if they're not. It'll be quite interesting when they finally get those issues resolved and when developers also try to make more unreal (pun intended) looking effects that interact more with realistic looking settings or characters. Having the freedom to make such a disjointed thing in a 3d renderer like how surrealists use to do with oil paints and the like it something underutilized in cinema and games imo.

psyc 5y ago
Horizon Zero Dawn has the best facial expressions I’ve seen yet. First I noticed the lip synching was very good. Then I noticed it also seemed to be doing procedural micro expressions as well as small eye saccades. Paired with subtle and expressive voice acting it’s remarkable.
- cloogshicer 5y ago
  Are you being serious? Don't get me wrong, HZD is an amazing game, but man the faces are absolute robots. That's not the team's fault though - any open world game with lots of dialogue will pale in comparison to hand animated faces.
  - psyc 5y ago
    I’d be happy to view video from a game you think does it better. Also see my other reply.
    - vvillena 5y ago
      Uncharted 4 comes to mind: https://youtu.be/KdDHJnqS32E https://youtu.be/KdDHJnqS32E That said, I agree eye movement is a great way to convey feeling, and Horizon Zero Dawn did it well (and its DLC even better). Yakuza 0 is another example of doing a good job. The exagerated animation style also shows in the characters' eye movements. A great sample is this sequence that, very conveniently, shows a blind character that lacks eye expression. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfVqfelfYHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfVqfelfYHo

unixhero 5y ago

I am thinking of changing careers because of this engine and this release - so that I can use it to solve things. Very excited to learn it.

yodon 5y ago

Has anyone spotted discussion of WebGL render targets? UE4 could target WebGL but for UE5 I'm just finding a few hobby/fanboy forum posts not anything official from Unreal.

imachine1980_ 5y ago
Conjecture 1) unreal is overkill for web and I feel ue5 is more, you can make a 500mb web game, but I don't play it 2) web makes no money, except in China, but point 1 still applies
lfowles 5y ago
The HTML5 target has been deprecated for several versions now.
programmarchy 5y ago
As mentioned, official support was dropped and the community supported extension hasn't been updated in ~2 years. If you need to target WebGL, then Unity is a better bet.
- throwaway675309 5y ago
  Unities web GL export has been in an experimental state for years now.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Even Unity isn't much better, the only good ones are the engines designed for Web specially like PlayCanvas and BabylonJS.
pjmlp 5y ago
You are better off with PlayCanvas and BabylonJS. WebGL 2.0 is stuck in 2011 hardware, something like Unreal is overkill. No wonder they decided to use pixel streaming with server side rendering instead.
astlouis44 5y ago
Our venture backed startup is actively working on integrating web support back into Unreal Engine, as we see a huge opportunity for a easy cross-platform export target for developers. We're working on a WebGPU backend right now for both UE4 and UE5, and have already upgraded UE4 to support WebGL 2.0 from 4.24-4.27, as support for HTML5 was removed back in the 4.23 release. Another major innovation is we've imported a more improved compression format (Basis) as part of our pipeline, we've also created an asynchronous set fetching that only grabs the required data that a user needs to see at any given moment, streaming the rest of the assets in the background as necessary. This dramatically reduces load times, which was one of the biggest complaints with Unreal on the web previously. Website for more info - https://theimmersiveweb.com/ https://theimmersiveweb.com/ Our Discord: https://discord.gg/cFJV6Yu https://discord.gg/cFJV6Yu

dom96 5y ago

Brilliant! I've been waiting for them to release this together with the Matrix sample. It looks like they have done so but have stripped a lot of the Matrix-specific assets.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

oneoff786 5y ago

Congratulations epic games team. Extremely impressive. Can’t wait to update

Animats 5y ago

Nice. Now to download and wait out the hours-long build. The city from the Matrix demo is available for download. I want to try that.

Animats 5y ago
Now to download and wait out the hours-long build. Now building module 524 of 3998... Inevitably, the Windows build is a download via a provided launcher, and the Linux build is getting the sources from Github, searching forums for the directions, and compiling for hours. Supposedly Nanite will work in Linux in the release version; it didn't in the pre-release.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

This sort of engine is a vast new vista of computing possibilities- apart from games and films, the opportunities for such 3D environments in many businesses is large (maybe huge!) So as someone who has never touched game dev, what is the learning curve like - exponential? What is "basic competence" once past "hello world"? Thanks :-)

oneoff786 5y ago
A lot of it is learning the engine api and how different parts interact. The basic competence level requires a pretty large body of knowledge. Can you, for example, Extend a character class, give it a skeleton, an animation blueprint with some animation states that read the character state, hook it up to player inputs, make it do some sounds, and add a bit of flair to some actions it can take? Can you build a basic ai behavior tree? Run some line traces to interact with colliders so your guy can interact with an object? Shoot a gun and spawn some bullets that can damage another unit? Etc.
- tomatowurst 5y ago
  You absolutely need those basic skills to be in a position to produce anything on Unreal Engine but its the sheer amount of work that comes after to produce anything of value is where the challenge is in my opinion. It almost certainly involves a dedicated asset generation capacity to generate enough novelty and/or a polished, smooth mechanic that can handle all the edge cases thrown at it. And there's a reason why the UE tools out of the box are so limited and frustrating to use to the point that its impossible to work on anything without opening up your wallet to purchase productivity tools sold on its marketplace and still struggle with the workload. Especially when it requires you to become proficient at C++ because blueprint's value drops outside animation rigging and VFX, both of which Unity's 3rd party marketplace tools have filled rendering UE's initial user friendliness nil. You are stuck with an enterprise tool marketed and suited for large studios but you thought you could make indie games faster than Unity.
  - oneoff786 5y ago

lvl102 5y ago

If Epic were public, I’d park all of my retirement funds in there. I’ve watched this UE5 development and actively developed in it as a non-gaming dev! They’re thinking 5-10 years ahead.

ChikkaChiChi 5y ago
In 10 years, I think we'll all be using 3D engines like this to develop everything the same way 3D cards were once for gaming/animation only. The tooling has demanded so much and Unreal has pretty much nailed it. If they can make their engine more generalized, it's going to become a killer app.
- lvl102 5y ago
  In 10 years, I’d imagine you can create an all digital movie or a game within days. Simply by typing a few descriptive words.
  - tomatowurst 5y ago
    Post-NeRF world: Google Maps and Waymo would've mapped the entire world, every city, road, terrain, crowd everything you can think of with any range of artistic tones, lighting, weather effects. It would be just a matter of paying Google a license fee to use their environment in a film or games. "Hey Google, generate a GTA V clone with cel-shading located in Liberia with Final Fantasy 7 characters but not enough to infringe on US copyright laws." "Sure, here is the link you can share or the downloadable executable to submit to Steam" "Good, you go ahead and submit that to Steam and let me know when it hits 10,000 downloads"
- terafo 5y ago
  You should note that I'm an amateur that toys with different game engines from time to time, but I don't think that any of their competitors is even close to be able to catch up with UE even if they have 10 years(not talking about current state of UE, but about state of UE 10 years from now). Unity does have some nice ECS things going, but overall their tech isn't good(prime reason why is that they don't make games, they make engine). Main branch of CryEngine is dead as engine that anyone aside from CryTek is using, but Amazon invests a lot into their fork(but it lacks vision TBH). Godot is good for 2d, but they aren't really going for that kind of experience.

tezza 5y ago

“Large World Coordinates (LWC)” - fantastic. My projects use Unity and any time the camera gets 1800m from the world (0,0,0) the camera begins to shake. By 2000m the shake is too violent to use. So you have to reset the coordinates by a hack if you want a world scale 1:1 map

imnotlost 5y ago
I just created a new scene in Unity 2020.3.5 and terrain going out to 6000 and a simple camera fly-script to fly around and it all looks good to me - no shaking. Using 32-bit floating point you'll have 0.1 accuracy up to 100000 at least. Edit - I just realized 10cm accuracy is not great (and that I'm talking to myself) so I tested with 0.001 and that's stable up to 9000.
oneoff786 5y ago
Ue4 used to rely on the world origin shifting hack too. But this has significant problems, especially in multiplayer.
jrootabega 5y ago
I've been working with Unity with the intention of making a large open world, and so this was one of the things I deliberately experimented with and tried to quantify. I found I had to be several orders of magnitude farther from the origin to notice stuff like that, and frankly I was a little disappointed that it was so hard to reproduce. Is there a sample project or description you could share that would help people observe that? I would not be surprised if certain circumstances other than purely distance make it worse. For example, when I traveled large distances solely on the world X axis, I saw my meshes quiver only when the camera was also aligned on/orthogonal to the X axis (don't remember which one exactly.)

ChicagoBoy11 5y ago

Can someone that has experience with Unreal Engine give some sort of approximation of what is required to sort of achieve minimum competency as a developer in it? Like, with web stuff, you can get up and running fairly quickly and slowly scaffold your way to more intricate projects... can the same be done with something like this or is the initial learning curve a bit steeper?

snarfy 5y ago
There is a learning curve but it's not too bad. It took me about 6 months to go from zero experience to winning prizes in their 'make something unreal' contest for unreal engine 3. If you have any development experience it should go pretty fast.
lazypenguin 5y ago
Yes, unreal is quite easy to get started in. You start with a scaffolding immediately when you start a new project. It literally has template options for different game types. It’s very friendly to artists as nearly all the art tools are gui driven. Blueprints are okay, I didn’t love them for all things but for a lot of things it was okay. Code is harder, you have to read their implementations of things if you want to do anything sufficiently complex. There’s not a lot of comprehensive technical material for the internals. Using unreal engine as a programmer feels like the using “enterprise” software in terms of scale and bloat except that it was built by seriously competent engineers.
- realusername 5y ago
  That's kind of the issue I have with those engines as a programmer not coming from games. Is there any good engine made for programmers? A kind of "bootstrap" of video games?
  - ThalesX 5y ago
    > Is there any good engine made for programmers? A kind of "bootstrap" of video games? There's so many starter kits out there, for Unity at least, even for older platforms such as Ogre3D and SDL, that I think the highest barrier of entry for any programmer is the fun idea.

ChikkaChiChi 5y ago

The Quixel integration is going to help devs quickly build out gorgeous concepts. It will also usher in a new era of asset flippers building garbage that also looks beautiful.

lbj 5y ago

Just amazing what these guys can do. The UE team and the Nvidia guys are doing 99% of the interesting work in graphics these days.

Stevvo 5y ago

From an art workflow perspective nothing even comes close. Just put down your models in the scene, place the lights and your done. All the additional scene setup and art passes that are no longer required really set artists free to actually work on the art instead of optimization and fake lighting. No baking lightmaps, no baking LODs, no hours spent placing 'fake lights' to simulate GI.

Jyaif 5y ago

The matrix demo project requires 100GB of disk space! While uninstalling games to free up space to download the project, I noticed that there was no correlation between a game's disk space usage and the amount of fun it provided.

drusepth 5y ago
With cloud gaming gaining in popularity at the same time asset detail/sizes are ballooning in size, it certainly feels like we're now ~1-2 generations away from games/experiences being so large most people won't bother installing them locally.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  That is why cloud companies are now also offering game development workflows completly based on their platforms.
oneoff786 5y ago
Would raw project files be larger than a compiled game? I assume yes. I’m not sure by how much.
- stonith 5y ago
  By an absolute bucketload. Valley of the Ancients was a 100GB project that went down to 25GB packaged if I remember correctly.
  - oneoff786 5y ago
    Sounds like a smaller drop than I would have expected tbh. Valley was pretty short. Is a large game of that detail really possible to ship with sane size requirements?

xmly 5y ago

Unreal or Unity, which one is easier for a programmer with zero experience on 3D gaming creation.

dafelst 5y ago
I use Unreal in my day job and I am very familiar with it, and I found it much more difficult to learn and operate than Unity. Even as an Unreal "expert", for personal projects I still use Unity, it is just much easier to get stuff up and running and iterate.
oneoff786 5y ago
I found Unity to be easier to start with but led to a lot of garbage. Unreal has a steeper initial learning curve but the system itself is more pleasant and the built in components are much more helpful. I switched to unreal after a couple years of Unity and strongly advocate others to do the same.
mbrodersen 5y ago
Definitely Unity.

rudedogg 5y ago

What are your options for creating addons/plugins for Unreal Engine? Do they have to be written in C++?

tomatowurst 5y ago
Pretty much. It's not for everyone but here's the nice thing about Unreal: If you pay for it using Paypal and it turns out the plugin is not as described, you can get your money back. Good luck of that ever happening with Unity. I was promised refund by Unity support for a totally non-responsive and outdated plugin that was on sale. They delayed and delayed until I could no longer get a refund. Having said that I do not recommend Unreal Engine for solo indie development but Unity also feels weird with confusion around which version you need to start with, DOTs etc. Unity seems like it is it for indie developers but its increasingly a cluttered landscape with lot of shoddy plugins

tehnub 5y ago

Nice announcement, but I really can't wait for an Apple Silicon build of the Engine. Would love to develop games on an M1 device.

andreasley 5y ago
The release notes [1] state that "preliminary support for native Apple Silicon for macOS targets" has been added. Also, there's now an "Import Xcode GPU Debugger Plugin for Mac". [1] https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/unreal-engine-5_0-release-notes/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/unreal-engine-5_0-re...
- tehnub 5y ago
  I may be wrong, but I think that is talking about creating games that run on Apple Silicon, not building the editor/engine itself for Apple Silicon (i.e. the dev setup). Regarding the XCode GPU plugin, that is cool; didn't see that, thanks!
  - andreasley 5y ago
    Actually: - Epic Launcher is using Rosetta - Unreal Editor is using Rosetta (first launch took an hour or two, maxing out one core only) - ShaderCompileWorker is using Rosetta - Packaged project for macOS is using Rosetta So I'm not quite sure what they're talking about.
    - tehnub 5y ago
      Yeah, at least it’s all working via Rosetta. When I first got my 13in MBP when it came out, I couldn’t get it to compile at all. The editor runs pretty well actually. I did an unreal 5 build, and it was a bit laggy, but if you turn off Lumen and TSR for the viewport renderer, it’s a lot better. It’s definitely usable under Rosetta, but native would surely be a lot better.

NWoodsman 5y ago

What is the profit model driving the development of this engine? How do they make it free?

maverickmax90 5y ago
Free for studios earning < some $$$ and a "x%" cut for studios that earn > some $$$

scotty79 5y ago

I'm confused. I downloaded UE5. Created starter fpp project. Built it and ran it as standalone onn dx12. Switched to fullscreen, showed fps counter (120fps on 120hz oled tv) but the "game" doesn't feel like 120fps. It feels like at most 60. And before I turned off motion blur it was really smudgy and after I turned if it's really choppy. What's happening?

jiggawatts 5y ago
Can be a few things, but a lack of mouse input smoothing can be a culprit. If the viewport angle is "locked" to the mouse input ticks, it can display at effectively 60 Hz, where you'll get two identical frames per mouse movement. So 120 Hz of graphics, but 60 Hz of content.
- scotty79 5y ago
  Does mouse give input at 60Hz in UE5 by default? On the windows desktop my mouse cursor movers definitely at 120Hz rate on this TV.