Epic Games Preparing Unreal Engine 5 For Debut In 2021 With Increased Photo-Realism

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Epic Games Preparing Unreal Engine 5 For Debut In 2021 With Increased Photo-Realism

Epic Games today offered the first glimpse at Unreal Engine 5, their next-generation game engine they hope to have out in preview form in early 2021 and for its official release before the end of next year...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Unreal-Engine-5-Announcement

[birdie]

Some extra details and an interview with developers:

[Ilfirin]

1) Just a demo. Remember Watchdogs?
2) Physics and game look all the same as PS4, even PS3 games. Just more detailed textures and much more bloody hardware requirements.

What are all talking about?

[CochainComplex]

Yes, Tomb Raider and Stargate in one game.


I fear some Epic store restrictions/lockin here

[kpedersen]

Looks great. I do find it a little strange that the output can run on recent phones but not slightly aging PCs that are still far more powerful than any phone. This really does limit its use in casual games. It is a shame because I would like to see it beat the pants off Unity.

As for development, I would very much like to have seen Blueprint disappear and Cling be used as a C++-scripting layer to avoid the extremely long debug build iteration times.

I wonder if they are still spending time on the windows tools trying to wrangle Microsoft's old C++ compiler rather than moving to Clang to keep things more consistent and clean.

[M@GOid]

I noticed they didn't focused on the character. That face was disappointing cartoonish. Also, the hair was done in a way to not allow comparisons with Lara Croft's Tomb Raider games. The FPS was also only 30. Looks like another console generation wishing PC-like 60 FPS. But overall is very impressive, the kind of thing you expect from next gen graphics.

Unreal Engine 4 was also very Nvidia biased on PC, with only a handful titles (from Microsoft mostly) performing well on AMD. With all consoles (well, excuse me Nintendo...) plus Stadia pushing AMD GPUs, lets hope they didn't let Nvidia grease their hands again to make AMD look bad on PC.

Also, with Stadia going full swing, lets also hope this new one will perform better on Linux, because the actual one perform like crap.

[CochainComplex]

I noticed they didn't focused on the character. That face was disappointing cartoonish. Also, the hair was done in a way to not allow comparisons with Lara Croft's Tomb Raider games. The FPS was also only 30. Looks like another console generation wishing PC-like 60 FPS. But overall is very impressive, the kind of thing you expect from next gen graphics.

Unreal Engine 4 was also very Nvidia biased on PC, with only a handful titles (from Microsoft mostly) performing well on AMD. With all consoles (well, excuse me Nintendo...) plus Stadia pushing AMD GPUs, lets hope they didn't let Nvidia grease their hands again to make AMD look bad on PC.

Also, with Stadia going full swing, lets also hope this new one will perform better on Linux, because the actual one perform like crap.

True too cartoonish.

According to the very AMD focused Consols I would assume that it must be easier to bring good AMD + x86_64 performance. Maybe the FPS cap is due to heavy GPU demand. that was 4k footage.

[Jabberwocky]

My #1 selling point for using UE is getting access to Quixel Megascans, it's truly amazing! You would need a really big budget to rival it. The amount of assets and ways of using it makes it "okay" if many projects used the same for their projects.

I'm still wondering when engines will target multi GPUs, sad that most are developing around consoles.

Looks great. I do find it a little strange that the output can run on recent phones but not slightly aging PCs that are still far more powerful than any phone. This really does limit its use in casual games. It is a shame because I would like to see it beat the pants off Unity.

As for development, I would very much like to have seen Blueprint disappear and Cling be used as a C++-scripting layer to avoid the extremely long debug build iteration times.

I wonder if they are still spending time on the windows tools trying to wrangle Microsoft's old C++ compiler rather than moving to Clang to keep things more consistent and clean.

Blueprints is a feature most "game developers" ask for these days... up to a point where if you don't have it companies won't use your engine. I'd call them <insert adjective> game engine users, but lets not hate on them. What I REALLY HATE are domain specific languages. I understand the need for it if I was a <insert adjective> game engine user.

I have not tried to compile it in many years, so I could be wrong. My response regarding clang is purely from what I read online. To compile on Linux: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/...ted/index.html as for compiling on Windows this post is from 2014 caveats are listed too https://forums.unrealengine.com/deve...ile-on-windows

[Guest]

Meh, I'm still a bit sceptical of Unreal Engine ever since version 3 with PhysX. That wasn't a fun time...

[kpedersen]

What I REALLY HATE are domain specific languages. I understand the need for it if I was a <insert adjective> game engine user.

Agreed. Blueprint *is* a DSL, just an even weaker annoying one requiring bindings in order to utilise any innovative middleware. Going between that layer and the C++ just makes spaghetti!

I have not tried to compile it in many years, so I could be wrong. My response regarding clang is purely from what I read online.

Ah, I meant Cling (https://root.cern.ch/cling). Mainly because a few months ago they were discussing adding a scripting language to UE4 (similar to how Python is available in the UE4Editor for the CG industry). However sticking to C++ would be much better because language can stay homogeneous and in the release build, a full native compile can be undertaken.

You are right though, some work has been done to get Clang as the main compiler on Windows but it is still experimental :/