We've been talking about the word next generation for three or four years, from the advent of Battlefield 5 ray tracing that made the RTX 20 series graphics cards useful in the hands of players, to now both battlefield 5 and 20 series graphics cards have become iterations, in fact, after seeing the "Matrix: Rise" game show demo at the beginning of the year, everyone realized that the concept of "next generation" itself has also undergone a drastic change. In this long generational overlap, Epic had plenty of time to prepare the UE5 engine, and now it's really coming to us, and last night, Epic hosted an online conference called "State of Unreal 2022" to launch the first public official version of the Unreal 5 engine to game developers around the world.
The tone of the press conference was a completely ToB direction, which can also be seen in the super high average hairline of the speaker lineup. UE5 engine developers have gathered a large number of industry veterans, who have optimized the difficulties they encountered in the development process for Unreal, which can be said to be a deep grasp of the industry pain points.
The content of the entire conference can be roughly divided into three aspects:
The first is the quality and lighting analysis of the Matrix Demo, emphasizing that the new engine can reach the height of fake reality, allowing photo-level, cinematic materials and special effects to reach the realm of real-time rendering - which means that whether it is playing or developing the game, participants can see the final visual effect directly. As for the upper limit of UE5, we can get a very shocking feeling in the short film "Ancient Valley" presented at the previous Demo and GDC developer conferences.
Lumen's instant ray-traced rendering can also be felt on the editor page
The second piece is the key part of the launch, the convenience of UE5, emphasizing that from individual developers to top developers, the new Unreal will be the most perfect platform and tool. For small development teams, a game paradigm called LYRA is provided, on top of which users can modify and learn all the features of UE5 at will. At the meeting, product executives from Epic personally used the UE editor to demonstrate the functions on the basis of LYRA, including real-time coverage of materials and lighting, and the interaction of developers has little to do with the code layer, and creators can focus more on the expression and design of the game.
The developer community is an attempt at future practitioner relationships
Supporting facilities include a built-in developer homepage into the engine, as well as a social forum to share your code, assets, and explore development challenges. Another eye-catching accessibility feature is the scanning modeling of objects in reality, although the use of cameras to record modeling has been a more popular technology in the AAA industry, but this time UE5 brought it to the mobile phone, individual developers can use the mobile phone camera to add materials to their own games, bringing this practical and convenient function outside the industry. Finally, all the material can also be sold or shared in the Unreal Store, building a game development platform that connects upstream and downstream, which is also what UE Engine has been focusing on for nearly a decade.
The third block, mainly the announcement of a new batch of AAA masterpieces using UE5, can be described as "bloody", first of all, the "Gears of War" series developer The Coalition, which works closely with Epic, thanks for their suggestions in the software beta, The Coalition is Microsoft's first-party studio, and also provides development support for the "Matrix" Demo.
The second is CD Projcet RED, which CDPR says will use UE5 in the next new Wizarding game, which means that they have abandoned their own RED engine. "Cybertron 2077" encountered optimization problems and bugs at the time of the first release almost destroyed the reputation of the game, and then CDPR chose to cold process 2077 and turned to the operation of the new wizard, which also means that the company's previous concept of "big brick flying" began to change, paying more attention to efficiency, quality control and cost, and announced the use of UE5 at this point in time, and the signal that was clearly released was that the use of UE would be more economical.
Recruit a white-haired monster killer
The third is Crystal Dynamics Crystal Power, which announced a new next-generation Tomb Raider and, of course, Powered by UE5 at the end of the conference. The graphics after the reboot of Tomb Raider were shocking, using an internal self-developed engine, but after the arrival of the next generation, they chose to switch to Unreal and endorse Epic. The release of the new game itself is also a big enough news to attract attention, but there is no picture display, and the game should give a watchable part at the major game festivals in the second half of this year.
At the end of the conference, a cooperation wall was displayed, including the big-name developers currently putting into use in UE5, you can see many familiar names and even domestic manufacturers, the domestic manufacturers LOGO position is quite close to the C position, I hope to see them come up with the same amount of next-generation works as this position. At this point in time, being able to grasp the development of new engine talents also captures the pulse of future game screens.