Epic Games has presented its new version of the Unreal Engine at the Summer Game Fest and has done it in a very special way: with a technical demo running in real time on a PS5. This is the first time that Sony's new generation console has been seen in motion.
The video, which you can see under these lines, has a duration of approximately 9 minutes in which two of those responsible for Epic Games show Unreal Engine 5 with playing a technical demo while explaining their ins and outs. This technical demo works in real time and even modifications are made to it as the video progressesFor example, the position of the light to demonstrate how the terrain responds to lighting.
The technical demo is titled Lumen in the Land of Nanite for two of the new technologies that Unreal Engine 5 includes as main novelties: Nanite is a virtual tool that allows developers to create "as many geometric details as the eye can see" thanks to micro-polygons, while Lumen It is a global lighting system that responds with immediate speed to changes in scene and light.
Nanite harness the power of consoles next-gen to give developers more creative freedom. According to Epic Games itself, video game creators can "import millions or billions of polygons directly into Unreal Engine 5 (…) and just work", causing them to forget about polygon counters and the amount of memory they consume, without losing a bit of quality.
For his part, Lumen renders infinite reflections on kilometer and millimeter scales so that lighting always responds dynamically to surrounding events such as "changing the angle of the Sun at a certain time of day, turning on a flashlight or opening a hole in the ceiling" and there will always be "an indirect light that will adapt accordingly". Lumen eliminates many intermediate steps that are necessary to determine the well-known volumetric lights of the current generation.
It is confirmed that Fortnite be available for launch in the next-gen
Along with this Unreal Engine 5 demo, the company has also made public its plans to bring Fortnite, its flagship, to the new generation: Epic Games has confirmed that the battle royale be available on PS5 and Xbox One at the launch of the consoles with a version similar to the one that you can already play, but later, in mid-2021, they will update the game to Unreal Engine 5 to benefit from changes in the graphics engine.
Epic Games explains in its official Web than Unreal Engine 5 to be available in preview in early 2021 with support for PS5, Xbox Series X, PC, Mac, iOS and Android projects. This new version of the engine have backward compatibilityIn other words, developers who are working with Unreal Engine 4 will be able to move their projects to the next version of the software once it is ready.
