UE5’s new virtualized micropolygon geometry system, Nanite, gives developers the ability to create games and experiences with massive amounts of geometric detail. In a demonstration, he showed how to move the light source, such as the sun, and see in real time how shadows unreal profiler and light change in Lyra’s images. The more developers lean on it, the more specific use cases we’ll find where the engine needs to be adapted to the needs of the games. This is counterintuitive and comes down to the trade-offs that studios are willing to avoid.
After a conversation with Sweeney, I returned to the Epic campus, this time to delve deeper into the new features and tools added to Unreal Engine 5 and to understand how those developments manifest on the screen. I sat in a boardroom at Epic watching The Matrix Awakens with the person who oversaw game engine development, Nick Penwarden, Epic Games’ Vice President of Engineering for Unreal Engine. Rendering detailed, photorealistic digital objects is a key topic in Unreal Engine 5, he told me when the demo began. IGN spoke with several AAA and independent developers to discuss what Unreal Engine 5 brings to the table and the potential ripple effects it could have on the industry.
In addition, this tool prepares the body of the virtual human, which facilitates animation in the game engine. Instead of creating separate levels of detail for each object, the game engine reduces the number of polygons in an object because it is further away from the camera. This technique reduces the complexity of the scene that the computer has to load and at the same time reduces the workload of the game developer.
Epic has confirmed that Unreal Engine 5 will make full use of this technology and we’ve seen surprising results in tech demos like Lumen in the Land of Nanite and The Matrix Awakens. Unreal can be used for the development of 2D games, but Epic Games doesn’t prioritize this feature set as much as Unity. By comparison, this was the same year Valve released Half-Life, and a year after id Software released Quake 2.
Unbeatable visuals are also the reason why more major studios use Unreal in the development of their games. With Unreal Engine 5 recently released, developers will continue to release some impressive games. As one of the world’s most popular motorcycles, its impact has been felt for years, but sometimes it’s good to look back at where it all started.
The game also came with higher image quality with support for the S3TC compression algorithm, allowing for high-resolution 24-bit textures without compromising performance. In addition to being available on Windows, Linux, Mac and Unix, the engine was ported via Unreal Tournament to PlayStation 2 and, using Secret Level, to dreamcast. Finally, one of the best things that can happen to Unreal Engine is the free-to-use system. Unreal Engine 5, first used under Unreal Engine 4, is free for all developers with less than $1 million in revenue. Once your game exceeds that, you’ll have to pay 5% of your gross revenue to Epic for using the game engine.
In the early ’90s, Sweeney began building the code that would eventually drive Epic’s first successful game in 1998, a first-person shooter called Unreal. After seeing teaser captures from Unreal, other developers started asking to use the engine. Epic continued to build new games using the evolving toolkit, including Gears of War, Infinity Blade, and Fortnite. With Nanite, Lumen, World Partition, and a more efficient pipeline, Unreal Engine 5 seems to be giving developers more power than ever over the scope, look, and mechanics of their games. “Unreal Engine 5 will continue to improve the quality of all games,” Genova said.
The real-time 3D capabilities of Unreal Engine 5 are applied in a variety of industries, from cinematography to architecture to engineering simulation. Many reject the Metaverse because “it’s just about games for kids,” without seeing that the underlying technology and techniques of video games will provide more value to all other industries. “It’s so easily accessible now that people who work at AAA studios and have a lot of colleagues who think they’re great can basically quit their jobs and build something great in a short period of time and I think it gives them that belief,” he says. “They watch Rocket League and they look at Ark and they think, ‘Wow, that could be us too.’ Really cool developers say, ‘Fuck it, I’ve always wanted to have my own game company’ and they get together and do something great very quickly. Developer.com contains tutorials, news, and tutorials focused on relevant topics for software engineers, web developers, programmers, and product managers of development teams.
