the Unreal Engine 5 already caused open mouths in Early Access with the tech demo Matrix Awakens. Now the engine is technically moving the next big step forward to a full release.
Epic Games announced that Unreal Engine 5 will be released around nine months after its Early Access launch as Preview-Version is available. This affects both the UE5 in the Epic Games Launcher and on Github. In the next step, Epic is now working on preparing the Unreal Engine for the full release.
The change in name should not only have a symbolic character, but also tangible improvements for developers be linked. Epic speaks of the basis for absolutely massive worlds
and from one AI Crowd System
which the simulation of thousands of agents
allow.
What’s new in Unreal Engine 5 Preview?
In the preview build, Epic gives the Unreal Engine 5 an all-round further development in the areas of animation, world building and rendering. Some of the new features at a glance:
- New Large World Coordinates (LWC) should enable huge game worlds. A lot of development effort is said to have flowed into performance and memory optimization.
- New Distance Matching affects the playback speed of animations so that they run in line with the actual movement of a character.
- The new Pose Warping dynamically changes the posture of game characters to match the movement sequence.
The features mentioned above were already demonstrated in the first presentations of Unreal Engine 5 and promise drastic graphics improvements for future games:
Unreal Engine 5
How good games could look in the future
That will be improved
Supporting systems of the new engine, such as the dynamic lighting technology Lumen and the geometry miracle Nanite, are technically improved in the preview build.
- Lumen receives full support of hardware raytracing, which should also be easily scalable in large open worlds. There are also visual tweaks to existing elements and new effects. Optimization and stability should also be improved.
- Nanite should perform better in the Unreal Engine 5 Preview and will receive new tools to simplify the work of developers.
- Virtual shadow maps should run more stable and performant. In addition, they now support more mesh types that are not based on Nanite.
- MetaSounds now allow further MetaSounds to be carried within themselves in order to create even more complex sounds.
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