Around nine months after its debut in Early Access, Unreal Engine 5 is now available as a Preview release on both the Launcher and GitHub, Epic Games announced today. While this still isn't to be considered a production-ready version of the engine, it is a major step towards that goal.
Some of the main additions in this new Unreal Engine 5 build include the ability to create even bigger worlds, support for mass AI (thousands of AI agents working in an open world simulation), various animation improvements, and even sound improvements. Of course, there are also performance and stability improvements across the board.
NEW! Distance Matching and Pose Warping
New in Preview 1, these two features combine to allow a small set of animations to work with a wide range of motions.
- Distance Matching controls the play rate of an animation so that it matches the motion of the in-game character.
- Pose Warping dynamically adjusts the pose of the animation to better match the motion of the in-game character.
NEW! Anim Blueprint Templates
This new Unreal Engine 5 feature enables you to create reusable animation graphs, as well as enabling engine features to be shipped as animation graph assets. With it, you can create animation Blueprint logic that isn’t bound to specific skeletons or assets. These assets cannot directly reference animation assets but instead can be reused in the context of other animation Blueprints.
NEW! IK Rig and IK Retargeter
These two new features make it easier and more efficient to animate skeletal characters in the Unreal Engine 5 Editor.
IK Rig enables you to interactively create solvers and goals that perform pose editing for your skeletal meshes. A common use case is to adjust a character additively while maintaining the existing animation, such as a moving character looking at a target.
IK Retargeter enables you to rapidly and robustly transfer animations between characters of different proportions across different skeletons. The retargeting can be done either at runtime or for offline creation of new animation assets.AI Updates
Mass AI. Simulate thousands of agents with the new AI Crowd system designed for Open World AI simulation.
Audio
MetaSounds
In Unreal Engine 5 Preview 1, you can now compose MetaSounds within other MetaSounds, similar to Materials, and there’s new support for user-defined nodes. In addition, you can now reuse graphs using Presets, which are references to a shared MetaSound graph but with new custom default inputs and settings.
MetaSounds also now feature an interface system that enables them to more deeply connect with the gameplay code and the world they're in, allowing for much richer, more contextual sounds.
Confirmed Unreal Engine 5 games include ArcheAge II, Ashes of Creation, Black Myth: Wukong, Dragon Quest XII: The Flames of Fate, the Game of Thrones mobile MMO by Netmarble, the next Layers of Fear game, Mortal Online 2, Quantum Error, Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, and STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl.
In other Unreal Engine news, Epic estimates that 48% of all next-generation games are being developed with its technology. Unreal Engine downloads also went up by 40% in 2021 compared to 2020.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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