Epic releases Unreal Engine 5 in Early Access and shows new demo

Epic Games has made an Early Access version of Unreal Engine 5 available to developers. The final release of the new game engine should be ready early next year. Epic also shows a new demo with features of the engine.

In a demonstration video, Epic focuses on Nanite, a technique that allows developers to easily add enormous amounts of geometric details to their games. Epic also shows how developers can divide a game world with Unreal Engine 5 into small pieces, in order to be able to work on a large open world game separately from each other.

Furthermore, the video elaborates on Lumen for realistic lighting and various tools to create animations. For example, with Motion Warping, one animation can be used for different situations. Epic shows an animation of a character climbing over an obstacle as an example. With Motion Warping, that animation can be adjusted based on the size of the obstacle.

At the beginning of the video, Epic shows footage shot on an Xbox Series X and a PlayStation 5. Unreal Engine 5 is suitable for developing games for consoles, PCs and mobile devices. The Nanite and Lumen functions are currently only available for the new consoles and Windows.

Epic is demonstrating the Unreal Engine 5 features with a demo entitled Valley of the Ancient, which has been made available for viewing as a sample project. The Unreal Engine 5 early version and 100GB demo project can be downloaded via the Epic Games Launcher. Epic has also created a two-hour Quickstart video tutorial and a video explaining how to port Unreal Engine 4 projects to the new engine.