“So in 5.0 we are going to be releasing a city
sample project,” says Nick Penwarden, vice president of engineering at Epic. “It is the city that The Matrix Awakens happens in, so that developers can jump in and they can see how we actually built the content for that demo. They can dive in, they can build on top of it, they can release their own content set in that city if they like, so they can use it as a foundation for their own creations. And they get to look under the covers at how we built the demo to learn from it.” UE5 has also launched with a new sample game,
Lyra, replacing the venerable ShooterGame that formed the basis for countless doodlings and proof-of-concepts during the life of UE4. “It is built with best practices in mind,” says
I
t says something about the release of The Matrix Resurrections that when I came to check my facts before handing these words
over to MCV/DEVELOP’s talented page layout artiste, I realised that I had got the name of the fourth Matrix movie wrong. I had assumed, understandably, that it was called The Matrix Awakens, which was of course the title of the Unreal Engine 5 demo released to capitalise on the movie’s release. It’s understandable why Epic chose to tie itself
to one of the hotly anticipated movies of the year, not least because of Keanu Reeve’s enduring cache with gamers, but what’s remarkable is that four months on from what was ultimately a disappointing and misjudged movie, neither time nor association has diminished the impact of Epic’s tie-in. The Matrix Awakens, while merely a demo,
was probably the best thing to come out of the franchise since the original movie. The good news for Matrix fans – and more so for developers - is that the full release of Unreal Engine 5 aims to deliver fully on what the demo only glimpsed at.
Penwarden. “It has all of the framework needed to support a game, so it supports networked multiplayer gameplay, it has a full menu system and menu flow that supports console, mobile, PC, supports matchmaking via Epic online services. And again,” he adds, “it’s intended to be a space that developers can jump in, start extending, start adding to and start playtesting games from day one.”
TRIED AND TESTED The head of UE5’s engineering team is confident enough with the .0 release that he says it’s ‘production ready’, which is to say in its current state games can feasibly be completed. “It’s really important to us that it be in a state that developers can have confidence in. That they can not only take the engine into production and start building content, but that they can actually ship games and release content from day one.” He makes the point that had it not been the case, The Matrix Awakens tech demo would not have been released in quite so playable a form: “We didn’t just show a video of it, right? We put it in people’s hands so they could play it and experience it themselves. But we also shipped Fortnite Chapter 3 on Unreal Engine 5. We went through the process ourselves of taking Fortnite, this major, triple-A game that runs across console, PC, mobile devices, and moved it on to the Unreal Engine 5 codebase. And then took all of the learnings, optimisations, improvements that came from that process, and we’re able to take that back into the 5.0 release of Unreal Engine. So again, developers can have confidence that Unreal Engine 5 is ready to ship because Epic have shipped Fortnite on it already.”
14 | MCV/DEVELOP April 2022
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