Unreal Engine 5 is Now Officially Out

The future of game development is here: Epic Games released the definitive version of Unreal Engine 5 on April 5 of this year, and devs are more than happy to start creating art by employing the miraculous software.

Many regard Epic Games’ game development software as the most powerful video game engine ever created, and with the latest entry in the Unreal Engine family, Unreal Engine 5, this viewpoint will certainly strengthen.

The first time Unreal Engine 5 made an appearance was on May 26, 2021, as an early access version. Epic Games already got busy with the creation of various video game demos after said launch, namely The Matrix Awakens, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II and the studio’s golden child Fortnite. With the release of the “complete edition” of Unreal Engine 5 though, game developers will now be able to push for a full-capacity performance, given the improvements made on the software.

Lumen and Nanite: two technologies aimed at photorealism

The goal is photorealism, cinematic interactive experiences you wouldn’t be able to distinguish from a movie. In order to achieve this, Unreal Engine 5 makes use of innovative technologies, such as Lumen, a global illumination solution that substitutes ray tracing that is higher quality and cheaper. The virtualized geometry system Nanite is another valuable addition, since it uses a new mesh format and technology capable of rendering the details on more complex objects by focusing only on the elements the human eye can perceive.

Lumen also eliminates the need for artists and developers to craft a lightmap for a given scene, since it calculates light reflections and shadows on the fly, thus allowing for real-time behavior of light sources.

Overall, the engine allows for the use of more complex 3D objects comprised of a good amount of triangles, but without hindering performance. This is achieved through smart automated solutions managed by the system itself, such as LOD (Level of Detail), which shouldn’t need massive manual intervention anymore. This turns out to be pretty convenient while importing polygon-rich objects made through photogrammetry, for instance.

Via Lumen and Nanite, Epic Games encourages developers in the creation of open-world video games, since these technologies make it extremely easy to do so without needing to spend excessive time on making brand-new detailed assets. It also seems like Unreal Engine 5 will help immensely with the management of open worlds because it allows devs to work on distinct sections more efficiently (CD Projekt Red is already sold on this idea, announcing that the next The Witcher will be made with the engine).

With the launch of Unreal Engine 5, Epic Games also released Lyra, an actual sci-fi shooter video game that poses as a tester, which developers can “study” in order to get a good grasp of how the engine performs: Lyra perfectly showcases Lumen and Nanite’s capabilities.

Other components will contribute to the realism-oriented experience, such as Virtual Shadow Maps, “a new shadow mapping method used to deliver consistent, high-resolution shadowing that works with film-quality assets and large, dynamically lit open worlds”, Niagara for fluid and particle dynamics, and Chaos for a physics engine.

Source: Multiplayer.it, Wikipedia