Unreal Engine 5 – Ultra Realistic Games On The Horizon
Unreal Engine is one of the most popular game engines developed by Epic Games. Currently, Unreal Engine 4 is used in games such as Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Fortnite. The announcement of Unreal Engine 5 has seen huge improvements in lighting, texture, and the ability to develop larger environments.
What are game engines?
Game engines play a vital role in creating games. A game engine enables game designers to bring the game to life. A game engine contains a readymade suite of visual development tools and reusable software components to simplify game development as much as possible. A game engine is built on 6 distinctive areas to help with game development:
Input
A game cannot exist without the input of the player which is via keyboard, mouse, games controller, and other devices. These inputs are then translated into actions within the game environment or character.
Graphics
Graphics within the game is an important factor for a game as most games today are based on how realistic they are. 3D graphics are developed from external 3D rendering programs like Maya and Blender. Once the 3D assets are created they are imported into the game engine. The game engine will provide features such as lighting effects, shadows, blending, and animation to help bring the 3D asset into life within the set digital environment.
Physics
The physics engine within a game engine enables game designers to perform accurate simulations of most real-life physical systems like the movement of rigid bodies, soft body mass, fluid dynamics. All these attributes are important to enable game designers to portray a realistic environment with gravity, collision detection, rotation & revolution, and speed of objects.
Artificial Intelligence
As more games become more realistic, games are expected to be more spontaneous and adapt to the player's movement and actions. This is important in games that are story-driven where AI characters need to interact like real players and how they respond to a certain action. The use of artificial intelligence will help make the game more realistic and immersive.
Sound
Game engines provide audio and rendering engines to help immerse players in the digital environment.
Networking
In the last decade within the gaming community, online gaming has emerged. Game engines now provide support for internet traffic and social API integrations to help game designers provide the best level of online gaming possible to their fan base.
What will Unreal Engine 5 bring to the table?
The latest version of Unreal Engine will bring huge improvements to the game engine enabling game developers to build a more realistic expansive environment with more detail than before. Here are a few game-changing features that Unreal Engine 5 will bring.
Nanite
Nanite is a geometry system that saves time when designing a massive amount of detail. It will allow game designers to import film quality art and eliminates tasks for loading in the level of details without impacting performance.
Lumen
Creating a realistic scene ultimately comes down to realistic lighting. Lumen enables game designers to make changes quickly by adjusting the lighting to match the time of day, light source and more. Lumen will allow designers to adjust lighting from open, dynamic scenes down to the smallest detail.
Expansive Worlds
Unreal Engine uses a grid system that will unload and load environments depending on the location of the player. Firstly, this will save resources on loading textures and environments that the player cannot see. Secondly, this system enables collaboration as different designers can work in the same environment.
Control Ride
Control Ride enables designers to create and share rigs across characters; saving development time.
4K, 8K, and 12K
Unreal Engine 5 allows greater file sizes to create 4K, 8K, and 12K textures. This is important as next-generation technologies will be able to render 4K, 8K, and 12K textures more quickly.
Film and Animation Production
The new realistic abilities of Unreal Engine 5 will enable the film and TV industry to create ultra-realistic scenes without having to film on location. For example, The Mandalorian uses Unreal Engine to build an entire 3D environment on set.
Summary
The introduction of Unreal Engine 5 will enable designers to create ultra-realistic environments with ease. The improvements in loading and unloading scenes when needed will mean players will not see a decrease in performance. Unreal Engine 5 will allow film and TV makers to take advantage of the technology to save time and money shooting scenes on location. Unreal Engine 5 will see the introduction of realistic immerse scenes and games.