may 13 Epic games officially introduced the fifth iteration of its game engine Unreal. “In the next generation, one of our primary goals is to achieve photorealism and parity between CG graphics and real life.” – Epic Games writes on its official website. The companies want to make the engine accessible to teams of any size and have developed “high-performance tools and content libraries” for this.
However, the company showed a technical demo Lumen in the land of naniterunning on the PlayStation 5.
Highlights:
Nanite: Nanite’s micro-polygon geometry technology allows artists to create as many geometric details as possible. It delivers film-quality picture quality and contains hundreds of millions or billions of polygons, and can also be imported directly into the Unreal Engine (from sculptures created in ZBrush to photogrammetric scans and CAD data), easily scales in real time and does not lose quality .
Lumen: Dynamic global lighting technology that instantly responds to scene and light changes. It provides reflections in huge, detailed environments on a scale from kilometers to millimeters. Using technology, artists and designers will be able to create more dynamic scenes by changing the angle of the sun at a specific time of day or by turning on a flashlight, or by creating a hole in the ceiling. Indirect lighting adapts accordingly.
“I think many people [спросят]: “It [демо] really? ” To which I will answer: the demo was launched directly from the PlayStation 5 DevKit, ”says Epic Games Technical Director Kim Libreri in an interview with IGN. “The HDMI cable was connected to the disc recorder and lost in real time – without editing, without tricks, all this is right out of the box.”
Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney, in turn, explained that Unreal Engine 5 is designed to “do things that are absolutely impossible today.”
“First, I think that Sony has significantly increased graphics performance compared to previous generations. But we get this every new generation, right? ”Sweeney jokes. “Sony has made another breakthrough, which in many ways is more fundamental: increasing storage capacity by several orders of magnitude and reducing latency.”
“[PS5] It contains a huge amount of internal flash memory located very close to the processor, ”says Sweeney. “So close that it fundamentally changes the laws by which games are created and launched. And this is crucial for this kind of demonstration. ”
As the head of Epic Games says, the console is not just hardware that can calculate many polygons and has a certain amount of memory, but also how the polygons are loaded into this memory while walking around locations. Sweeney says that you don’t take into account such details when playing, but that would not have been possible without the breakthrough Sony made.
Sweeney claims that Sony’s storage architecture is far ahead of “the best SSD you can get for a PC right now.” The head of Epic Games says he will be curious to see “how the console market will thus push the PC high-end market forward.”
Preview version Unreal engine 5 will appear at the beginning of next year, the engine will be released in full release later in the same 2023. UE5 will support current and next generation consoles, as well as PC, Mac, iOS and Android.
With the announcement of the fifth version, the creators of Unreal Engine 4 refused deductions for the sale of a copy of the game on the “outdated” engine. Starting today, developers will be able to download and use the fourth iteration to create games for free. The need to pay royalties does not apply to studios that have received a game profit of $ 1 million or more.
One of the first games released on Unreal Engine 5 will be Fortnite. The release of the royal battle on the next generation consoles will take place in mid-2021.
Screenshots:
Read also: What’s it like to develop games for the Xbox Series X: The creators of the space shooter Chorus: Rise as One tell
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