What have you learned from UE5’s early access period? And how has it changed the emphasis or the trajectory of UE5? Nick Penwarden: I’ve been really impressed with all of the content that the community has built with early access, and what they’ve been able to do even with that very early version of Unreal Engine 5. One of the things that we were able to use early access for was a way for us to gauge how easy is it for developers to be able to migrate content and projects from Unreal Engine 4 to 5, making sure that the path we created for bringing projects over was as smooth and painless as we were looking for. And so it was a good validation of the work and effort that we put into that. Aside from that, we were looking at all of the content
that developers were trying to create and understanding where we are seeing potential improvements that we can make to Lumen, to Nanite, to workflows. We’re seeing great visualisations made already, but we think we can improve them a little bit better in a particular use case, particularly some of the architectural visualisation samples that we made look beautiful, but we felt we could make them even better. And so how we use that feedback to further influence the
development of those features and functionality. And, of course, we received a lot of feedback from the community, whether it’s crash reports, or feedback on forums of things they liked about the the UI changes, other UI changes that they were interested in, bugs or workflows that that didn’t quite feel done, and then being able to incorporate those elements and feedback into the final release.
When you started on the path to creating UE5, you obviously wouldn’t have foreseen the prevalence of remote and hybrid working, how has “the new normal” changed UE5’s features? NP: I think with Unreal Engine 5 we were already looking at a future where teams were more distributed. Internally
at Epic we have developers around the world. Many of our licensees and those who use Unreal Engine are distributed, so some of the efforts that we have in flight, sort of under the hood, for how the engine manages data, things like when you import a texture, how we cache the compressed result of that and distribute it to developers who need it - as we built those systems, we already had in mind developers that were remote. And that was more for those initially for our internal development needs, as well as seeing licensees who have multiple offices. With the pandemic, having everybody at home accelerated the need to invest in those aspects of the engine, the sort of core parts of the engine. And now we’re seeing a large number of new developers pop up who are entirely remote. And so something that began as a way to support large distributed developers is now technology that I anticipate is going to be important for nearly all developers going forward.
Unreal Engine has always pitched itself at the premium end of the engine market, so to speak. How does UE5 further target increasing numbers of indie, casual and small scale teams? NP: Well, I think the biggest advancement in UE5 is - this is something that goes across all of our efforts with Unreal Engine and the entire ecosystem – about how we can, not only push what’s possible with what the end visuals can look like, but how we can improve the tools and workflows in a way to make achieving those outcomes simpler. So when you think of a technology, such as Nanite, it’s not just you can render billions and billions of triangles, you can import these high resolution sculpts that an artist is able to make and do less processing on them; not have to yourself go and bake normal maps, and AO maps and go through all these technical steps in order to get good looking results. When you think about a technology like Lumen, it’s
not just about achieving great looking global illumination, it’s about the ability to put lights in the scene and see it light naturally in real time without having to go through a baking process, without having to artificially place fake light sources throughout the world to make it look like global illumination is happening. So it’s removing the need to go through all of these technical hurdles that you had to previously and letting the engine do the heavy lifting. The same thing was in our mind with World Partitions.
Generally, if you want to build an open streaming world, you need to think up front about how do I break content into chunks that I can stream in and out at runtime? How does that influence how I build levels? How does that influence how I collaborate with other developers on the team? And the great thing about World Partition is that you don’t have to worry about that. You can just create one massive level, start adding content to it, build over
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