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Games Technology

Epic's Unreal Engine 5 Has Officially Launched (axios.com) 60

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
Epic Games has officially launched Unreal Engine 5, its newest set of software tools for making video games. From a report: While Epic may be known to much of the public for its hit game Fortnite, its core business has long been Unreal. Epic's goal is to make Unreal Engine the definitive toolset for building games, virtual worlds and other digital entertainment. The engine is free to download, but Epic then takes a 5% cut of games that generate more than $1 million in revenue. During a kickoff video showcase today, the selling point wasn't just what the engine can do, but who is using it.

Epic workers demonstrated how the engine could be used to make and tweak modern games. Then came the key slide showing dozens of partners, including PlayStation, Xbox and Tencent followed by testimonials from recent Unreal Engine converts CD Projekt RED, which had previously used its own tech to make games in the Witcher and Cyberpunk franchises and ending with the kicker that Crystal Dynamics, another studio that long operated its own in-house engine, would use Unreal on its next Tomb Raider game. More details at Kotaku.
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Epic's Unreal Engine 5 Has Officially Launched More

Epic's Unreal Engine 5 Has Officially Launched

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  • The Blue Fairy [wikipedia.org] might turn it into a Real Engine ... :-)

  • The real big thing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2022 @04:04PM (#62420562)

    The real big thing about UE5 seems to be seamless integration with massive asset libraries. You can literally add a tremendous amount of premade art assets with just a few clicks. They also have a way to literally use your phone to take a 3D image of an object like a chair and add that into UE5 with a few clicks.

    That would actually solve one of the biggest problems with current indie games. Lack of good premade art assets.

    • Re:The real big thing (Score:5, Interesting)

      by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2022 @04:48PM (#62420684) Journal

      Yeah.... but I also can't help but think with modern 3D "first person" games, original artwork is one of the main things people buy and enjoy them for.

      Pre-made art assets would quickly make the indie titles feel "canned" when you started recognizing the same items like treasure chests or paintings on walls re-used in multiple titles you played.

      Ability to scan real objects in easily from a phone seems like a pretty big deal to me. I'm not a developer, but I can think how much it would improve a lot of games to be able to scan in a collection of physical objects that you know would go well with the time period you're trying to portray. (EG. Imagine a game set in the early 1900's where you just created art assets out of old signs, lamps, plates, furniture, appliances and more from a few antique store visits.)

      • Copyright is going to get interesting. The 3D printer movement would have the same problem.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        That's exactly what they had in the demo. They showed scanning an old worn out leather chair with a phone, and then that asset uploaded into UE5 and manipulated.

        As for "canned assets", that is the current problem, where a lot of assets already come from a handful of libraries. In their UE5 demo, Epic showed that they're collaborating with a high quality assets producer, and implied that even games like the upcoming Witcher game is going to use some such assets to save development time.

        So you're probably bot

        • There's nothing wrong with canned assets. It's just like making a movie in real life. Do you think movie or TV crew, shooting a scene in a park, build a whole park from scratch? Do you think they design their own custom park benches, trash cans, etc.? No, they just use an existing park "asset", with off-the-shelf park benches and trash cans.

          When they decorate the apartment of a character, the stuff that goes in there is all consumer stuff they bought. There might be some unique props that they created, but

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by noodler ( 724788 )

          That's exactly what they had in the demo.

          That was not a demo, that was an ad.
          It's going to be a lot less practical and will generally give worse results than what you saw in the ad.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

            How are demos different from ads in your world? They're literally a subcategory of ads.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by noodler ( 724788 )

              A demo demonstrates something. An ad advertises something. Look these words up, they are in the dictionary.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                Now this is slashdot of old. Maximum autism.

                Fine. I'll spell this one out.

                Advertisement is a tool of selling people something. Demo is a subcategory of an ad that includes demonstrating the product function.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by noodler ( 724788 )

                  Demo is a subcategory of an ad that includes demonstrating the product function.

                  That's usually referred to as a 'Product Demonstration' and is a particular type of demo.
                  But demos come in many forms and are done for many reasons.
                  What is the stewardess that gives a demo of how to use the oxygen mask trying to sell to you?
                  My karate teacher used to demo moves. What was she selling by showing the moves to her pupils?

                  Aaaanyway, back to topic, the UE5 ad showed an unrealistically perfect experience of capturing an object with a phone like it's magic. It is not a demo. It's an ad because they

      • Its exactly what happens. The Asset Store is nothing new, but after abuse of it during the steam green-light era, where people would just take demo levels from asset packs, upload them and try to bilk people into buying them, a very strong aversion to "asset flipping" emerged in the gamer community.

        With all that said, most games will have at least a few purchased assets, if theres a perfectly good tree on the store, why make it yourself, if your on a time and money crunch. The art is integrating them in, an

      • original artwork is one of the main things people buy and enjoy them for.

        Can't say I've ever played a game and though about how amazing the texture on a door looked. There's a difference between "original artwork" and "completely unique self made assets".

        Reused assets have always existed. I bet you've never even noticed.

        • Yeah, I probably should have explained myself better. I don't mean people are buying games so they can be thrilled by how realistic the grain of the wood looks on a door in it. What I mean is, with the engines being the same, people are essentially buying the same program over and over with a first-person 3D title, except for the fact that the art is unique. The artwork is what primarily differentiates a shooter from taking place in the frozen Arctic in the future, or in the old West ... Different charact

    • You literally use literally too much.

    • As cool as I think that tech is, it's also the reason why some games are pushing 250GB... all of which has to be downloaded. I won't touch that crap.

      Hard to teach people to be frugal when everything can be done with a few clicks.

      • Why are we being frugal? You could listen to AM radio, that saves bandwidth. You could use a 16 colour CGA monitor and save on GPU VRAM. You could run DOS / Windows 95 to save RAM, browse the internet using Lynx, etc, etc, etc.

        But just because you can doesn't mean you should. Your facetiousness doesn't help, no games are 250GB. The larger ones are around half that (Call of Duty Black Ops is being massively mocked at the moment and it's 160GB). But even if they were 250GB I can download that in an hour. I li

    • That's kinda neat, but it still seems like a lot of effort to put into a slideshow player.
  • Unity was on par with Unreal. It would be nice to have an alternative.

    • Just you wait. The Godot groupies will be along soon.

    • I agree. It might not be as advanced, but it the workflow is an order of magnitude nicer.

      • I'm less concerned with how advanced it is (I've come to appreciate blistering-edge graphics less and less as I age) and more concerned with the fact that every Unity game I have generally has pretty shit performance on my silly high-end machine.

        Unsure if related to the .NETtiness of it all, or not, but it's what I always notice on Unity games that are otherwise really fucking clever and innovative in terms of gameplay.

        • and more concerned with the fact that every Unity game I have generally has pretty shit performance on my silly high-end machine.

          This. So much this. I used to not care about this, especially with smaller indie games. Until I got a VR headset. Now when a game as amazingly immersive in VR as Subnautica can't maintain 90fps it's not just annoying, it's outright nauseating. It's a shame that games with graphics so limited can run so poorly.

        • So I understand it, Unity used to run on Mono and .NET Framework. There should be a decent performance boost once Unity switches to using .NET Core 6.0, and games use the new features, like Span support to reduce garbage collection, etc.

          • Sounds good to me. Unity is obviously well liked by the indie developers, who I'm currently addicted to throwing money at, so anything that is a net win for both of us is fantastic in my eyes.

            • Yeah, I would assume it will make the issues that appear when trying to port to linux, arm, and macs a lot easier and less complicated too.

  • I have to admire the companies that still do in-house engines, it has to be hard to look at the ease of just using UE for what you are doing... as the list of companies now using UE shows.

    One in particular I really like is the engine for Horizon: Forbidden West (and the original game), Decima. The team has done an amazing job with an engine that handles huge outdoor spaces really well, including fantastic environmental lighting effects.

    Also any clip I've seen form Lego Star Wars looks pretty good though I

    • I am pretty sure it was not the plastic shader, but they somehow calculated 5% of their gross revenue will be marginally bigger than using/upgrading a previously developed in-house engine.

      • somehow calculated 5% of their gross revenue will be marginally bigger than using/upgrading a previously developed in-house engine.

        Yeah I agree that's probably it though given the delay and loss of income (seems like they could have had a game out last year if they had not been struggling with their own engine tech) I'm not sure how much they really saved.

        Also, I'll bet a really big name like Lego Star Wars is not paying 5%.

        • Apart from not having to pay 5% they can also charge other people for using their engine. Looking at this [wikipedia.org] it looks like they've licensed their engine to at least two other companies. I don't know how much they made from it but it was something at least

          Hopefully they end up licensing it to more companies. UE5 looks very good but it's always good to have more competition

  • When I think of Unreal, I think of no support for Linux and MacOS. So yawn at that news, I'd rather encourage a non-monopolistic game engine and ecosystem.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lordlod ( 458156 )

      The Unreal Engine supports Linux and MacOS, I believe it always has.

      Unreal Tournament 1 used the Unreal Engine 1 and ran on Linux.

      There are a bunch of UE4 games on Linux. Epic has announced that UE5 improves Linux support.

      Many of the developers, including Epic, don't release their games on Linux for various reasons. However those reasons aren't because the engine doesn't support it.

    • Re:Support for platforms (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2022 @07:28PM (#62421058)

      When I think of Unreal, I think of no support for Linux and MacOS.

      That's odd, given that UE5 lists the following platforms [unrealengine.com] as being officially supported (emphasis mine):

      What platforms does UE5 support?
      Unreal Engine 5 enables you to deploy projects to Windows PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Google Stadia, macOS, iOS, Android, ARKit, ARCore, OpenXR, SteamVR, Oculus, Linux, and SteamDeck. You can run the Unreal Editor on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

      PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and Google Stadia console tools and code are available at no additional cost to developers who are registered developers for their respective platform(s).

      I'd have suggested you were thinking of UE4, but UE4 supports both of those platforms and many more [wikipedia.org]. And if we keep looking back, UE3 supported those two platforms as well. As did UE2. As did UE1. In fact, it's fair to say that Unreal Engine has supported both Mac and Linux from the very beginning, and continues to support both to this day.

      Perhaps you're confused because devs don't want to take the time porting their games to other platforms? That's a related, but separate, issue.

    • Shame on you, mods.

      UE has had first-party support for Linux and MacOS since UE4, and was ported in cases prior to that. UE5 continues that first-party support.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

        Shame on you, mods.

        Why? Mods are doing what they've always done and what we expect them to do on Slashdot. No need to actually engage a brain when someone says something about Microsoft or Windows, just smash that mod button.

        Microsoft Sucks! Now mod me up sheepmods.

  • UT4 where? (Score:3, Funny)

    by apn_k ( 938000 ) on Tuesday April 05, 2022 @05:40PM (#62420818)
    Wake me up when they finish Unreal Tournament 4.

    • That got cancelled 4 years ago, and I don't think they'll just pick it up again after all this time. If they do another UT in the nearish future it will likely be called Unreal Tournament 5 to match the UE version.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by cbm64 ( 9558787 )
        I wish.. Still remember UT as by far my favourite multiplayer FPS shooter game, I spent so so many hours having fun with it. Played the UT4 pre-beta they released and had hopes, but even before it was officially cancelled it was clear it was a dead-end project. Fortnite success came along and Epic moved all resources.

        But now you have started a UT5 rumour :) I will cling on to it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by martinX ( 672498 )

      The launch will be some time in the future with special guest, the Great Prophet Zarquon.

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