Game development on Unreal Engine 5

Unreal Engine 5 is the next generation game engine from Epic Games. It contains a huge arsenal of off-the-shelf technologies and assets to solve most of the problems associated with the production of games, and allows developers to focus on creating content instead of writing basic functions. Thanks to this, the quality of games and the speed of their time to market are greatly increased.

UE 5 is used to create most modern AAA games, here are some of them:

• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2.
• The Witcher 4.

• Black Myth: Wukong.
• Tomb Raider.
• EFootball 2022.

Some of these projects are still in development, indicating that Unreal Engine 5 is the technology of the future.

In this article, we will talk about what distinguishes UE5 from other engines, and why it is preferred to use it in their projects by the world’s largest game development studios.

In the spring of 2022, Epic Games opened access to Unreal Engine 5 for all developers. The new version of the engine has absorbed all the positive features of its predecessor, Unreal Engine 4, and received many innovative solutions. Let’s take a look at the main advantages of UE5 that make it so popular in the game development market.

Programming languages

Unreal Engine 5 supports two programming languages:

• C++. A scalable and flexible language that allows you to work at a low level with memory, addresses, ports. This gives developers the opportunity to take full advantage of the technical capabilities of devices to ensure maximum performance.
• Blueprints. Visual scripting system that is used only in Unreal Engine. It makes it possible to create games even without writing code, which makes the engine accessible even to novice developers. True, in large projects, Blueprints is mainly used in order to create prototypes as quickly as possible and test new ideas that arise during the production process.

The important thing is that these technologies can be used in parallel. That is, code written in C++ can be converted to Blueprints and vice versa, which is very convenient when creating large-scale projects.

Photorealistic lighting

Lighting is one of the most complex and time-consuming tasks in game production. Initially, to solve it, the ray tracing function used in cinematography was implemented, which became available in the previous generation Unreal Engine 4.

When creating Unreal Engine 5, Epic Games went even further and implemented Lumen technology. It relies heavily on temporary upsampling with the Temporal Super Resolution algorithm and is capable of outputting images in 4K quality.

Lumen can reach 60 fps on next generation consoles when the engine uses a high level of scalability for global illumination and reflections.

Dynamic Level of Detail

3D models of the virtual world consist of different polygons that form its surface, respectively, the more details an object has, the more polygons. This means that when loading a large number of highly detailed objects during the game, the device will consume a large amount of resources.

To get rid of this problem, developers can create different levels of object detail. For example, if the character is in the foreground of the screen, its detail is maximum, and decreases as it moves away.

This is really effective, but to implement such a task, you need to create several options for displaying the same model with different levels of detail, which is quite laborious. However, Unreal Engine 5 offers to do this automatically, using Nanite technology, which simply reduces the number of polygons as the object moves away from the camera. This removes a significant part of the burden from developers and allows you to release games with excellent graphics many times faster.

Compatibility

Unreal Engine 5 has direct compatibility with the previous version of the engine, so games created on Unreal Engine 4 can be easily ported to UE5.

Multiplatform development

On UE5, you can create games for most existing platforms, including PC, PlayStation, XBox and Nintendo Switch consoles, IOS and Android. At the same time, developers can quickly transfer the game to a new platform without spending much time and budget.

Tools for open world development

Open world games, where the user can perform almost any action and is not limited by locations, are in high demand among gamers. With the advent of Unreal Engine 5, the creation of such virtual universes has become much easier.

For example, the Megascans resource library gives developers access to over 16,000 different and unique resources that can be used in their project out of the box or combined to create completely new and authentic objects – walls, debris, cars, vegetation and more. If the library does not have the desired object, using the Quixel application, you can 3D scan the asset in the real world and transform it into an in-game item.

Unreal Engine 5 also includes the Metahumans tool, which allows you to quickly create realistic human models and customize their appearance by editing facial features, hair, eye color, wrinkles, and more. Thanks to this, each person inside the game becomes unique.

Another revolutionary feature of UE5 is the ability to recreate scenes in the real world by loading detailed geospatial data from anywhere on the planet. At the same time, it is not necessary to record data manually, this can be done using the Cesium tool.

For all its benefits, UE5 remains accessible to most new projects. Its use is shareware free.

This means that until the project begins to make a profit of $1 million per year, nothing needs to be paid, after reaching this barrier, Epic Games’ royalty will be 5% of the income.

The UE5 engine is a revolutionary game development engine that allows you to create incredible game projects. If you want to launch your own game, contact AVADA MEDIA.

Our specialists have practical experience in implementing and launching games on Unreal Engine 5, and will help turn your idea into reality.