Today, Unreal Engine officially announced that Unreal Engine 5 is now in preview! Creators from all walks of life are invited to participate in the test, and the Unreal Engine 5 preview can be downloaded and started through the Epic Games Launcher or GitHub.
This also means that maybe within the year, everyone will be able to play games made in Unreal 5.
Unreal Engine Official Text:
If you've been eagerly awaiting a production-ready version since we offered Unreal Engine 5 Early Access last year, the news will surely delight you – we've reached the next milestone: Unreal Engine 5 is now in preview!
Since the release of Early Access, we've built Fortnite based on Unreal Engine 5 and used this version to create our technical demo, The Matrix Awakening: Unreal Engine 5 Experience. All of our efforts are aimed at making Unreal Engine 5 more production-ready, more stable, and more complete.
We are currently working on a final release and are ready to test all the features we intend to incorporate. In addition to improvements to previously made public tools such as Nanite, Lumen, One Actor One File, World Partitioning System, and MetaSounds, you'll find some exciting new animation tools, as well as basic support for large world coordinates. We'll cover it in more detail later in this post.
We must emphasize that the preview version still has instability and other issues and should not be used in production. If you want to experiment with new tools and workflows using existing projects, we recommend that you back up those projects. However, we welcome you to fully validate these tools to help us identify any remaining issues so that we can fix them in the final release. Please log any issues you encounter on our Bug Reports page.
Unreal Engine 5 Early Access is primarily intended to showcase new features for next-generation game development. And in this preview, we want to invite creators from all walks of life to test it. Note, however: while your existing workflow is supported and you should be able to work in UE5 in the same way as you did in UE4, some important new features such as Lumen and Nanite haven't been validated in non-game workflows.
Still, you'll be delighted with features like the redesigned Unreal Editor, better performance, an expanded geometry editing toolset, and improved path tracing! There are many features here that deserve your in-depth study, and we look forward to hearing your feedback.