It is an exciting time to be a game developer using Unreal Engine these days. Leading up to now, Unreal Engine has been making major pushes showing off things like Quixel among other things. This has left a few bread crumbs for the community to ponder how Unreal Engine is going to allow the game developer to handle up to 8k resolution high-quality scans of 3D objects with ease. A lot needs to be done to get the game assets ready in many cases.
There have also been some delays in other things. Many were expecting to hear or see more about Epic Online services. See updates to older asset packs Unreal Engine 4 provides. Along with when is the next major tech demo going to be out? Most of that has been answered today
In a first look release by Unreal Engine, they have announced Unreal Engine 5! They even gave a tech demo of a project running on a next-gen consul. As seen above in the video. It was quite impressive in some of the new technology they are s showing off.
Geometry With Nanite
The answer to how do you allow game developers to use 8k high-resolution scans of 3D objects with easy is allowing them to just have billions and billions and did I say billions of triangles in a single scene. Well duh! That what we all want but most are not rocking a gaming rig that would not set on fire by doing that.
Unreal Engine 5 will have a new geometry system called Nanite. While they did not get into many technical details it seems worrying about polygon counts is going be a thing of the past.
For anyone who has attempted to make a game before. We have all see what happens when people have to stress over reducing polygon counts and other assets to bring performance up. You will often find “3D” objects that more or less had anything the player would not be seeing removed. They tend to have no backside, sometimes sides of objects were chopped off. Unless an object needed to be bigger than a pixel wide they tend not to be (don’t tell anyone!)
Over the year that has left some amusing entertainment for games when they look back at a scene and the game developer did not take into account that viewing angles. Result in see-through meshes and just odd looking objects for the player to view.
If that is going all be a thing of the past. Holy smokes, indie developers are going to start ramping up the quality of their graphics. They won’t need massive budgets to pull things off. Heck, they might not even have to understand more complex things when it comes to 3D objects in a video game. Unreal Engine 5 could be powerful enough to just take care of it for them. The amount of work Unreal Engine 4 already dose is impressive in its own right this takes it to an eleven.
Lighting With Lumen
A major challenge a lot of indie game developers run into is lighting. I still have quite a lot to learn about lighting myself in general. It can also be a rather time and resource-intensive thing to deal with. Lighting needs to be baked and rendered. While large gaming studies have the budget for rendering farms it’s the little guy who going be sitting around forever waiting on his light mapping to build.
Lumen is looking to change that by just saying no more. Forget having to render lighting and making lighting maps and all that stuff.
My first question is: what kind of sorcery is this? No more waiting hours on a single map if I want high-quality production lighting? It’s all now just going be done in real-time and better than ever? Call me intrigued!
In Unreal Engine 4 while they have a “preview” option and it’s decent depending on what kind of changes you have made to the lighting in your scene. Unreal Engine 5 is going blow this thing out of the water. Real-time viewing just not a preview that gets it sometimes really close is a big difference.
Epic Services
A while now many have been waiting for several epic services to be launched to a wider audience. It has been delayed in the past and now we know why. They were looking to include it after some further polishing with news about Unreal Engine 5.
I have not dug too much into it in the past since I was waiting for it to be live. More can be read about these services for game lobbies, scoreboards, and other stuff on this post
Royalties To Unreal Engine
Ah yes, you would think this is where the shoe drops and they got us all! Expect you would be wrong. Instead of upping rates or doing anything like that to use Unreal 5 or even 4 for all the new stuff we are getting. They made some changes that I think are for the better.
One of the bigger things here from their FAQ about licensing fees is royalties are staying at 5%. This includes using a lot of stuff like Quixel which is just included under your Unreal Engine license. They are also always adding new features that get included. Since you are not paying anything out of pocket to just use Unreal Engine 4 even 5 to start with that is huge.
The old cap before you would need to start paying 5% in royalties fees use to be if you exceeded a couple of thousand per quarter with several expectations and rules if I recall. That has been updated to a more flat line of just $1 million in gross revenue according to their FAQ.
There still seems to be some old language floating around in some outdated pages regarding these changes. I, however, am a big fan of how Unreal Engine is trying to make things simple to understand. I forget how many times now I’ve just wanted to check out something new and cool. Instead of having to deal with an insane amount of different license agreements many where just “this is covered under your Unreal Engine license” and you just continue forward.
Final Thoughts
I think this is massive news for indie game developers who are using Unreal Engine in general. It will be interesting to see what all from Unreal Engine 5 passes down to Unreal Engine 4. Along with all the other stuff they are going be showcasing as we march closer to their expected release date in late 2021 (I’m going to assume Q4 but that is just speculation on my part).
This will further reduce costs and allow smaller teams to do even bigger laps around the massive industry titans of the game development world. Creating even more competition for gamers money who can start expecting to see a lot more out of those indie game developers. This appears to be quite game-changing if Unreal Engine 5 can live up to what is being shown.
While it sounds like they are going to try and make it “easy” for many to move from Unreal Engine 4 to 5. I am not sure I would. Updating to the latest versions is not something I’ve even attempted yet since a lot of the stuff I’m using is not supported by newer versions in the store --yet. What version I ended up using was what worked with a lot of things I wanted. I still have a couple of years before my game will be out so I’m sure I’ll try it some point since Unreal Engine 5 should be out by then.
For future games, I plan on creating once I’m finished with my current one. it looks like I will be doing so in Unreal Engine 5. I’m super excited about the future of those games!
Information
Content was written by @Enjar. Screenshots are from Unreal Engine 5 Announcement.
