Unreal Engine 5.5!

Today at Unreal Fest in Seattle, they revealed Unreal Engine 5.5. The preview is available for download and in this video we look at the most exciting new features, but especially the new mega lights, that you can expect in this release.
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[@colin_actually]

Woah those textured area lights are insane. So cool. Gosh that would make things so much easier for devs in many situations.

[@gamefromscratch]

The textured area lights are absolutely mind blowing, a holy grail of real-time lighting in many ways. Will open up so many opportunities.

[@Capewearer]

To be precise, textured area light were in Crysis 3 (you can also find them in open-source Ogre3D-Next), but there never were so much shadow-casting lights. That's the real achievement.

[@ashy49592]

I want them to focus more on optimization with the next one or will need a 2000$ gpu just to run the ue editor

[@cialk]

They already started, a month or so ago they added cpu parallelization for many critical parts of the engine, megalights also seems a lighting chunking system which should make light rendering more efficient in normal use The roadmap is also full of optimization focused stuff

[@LittleBlue42]

Exactly. Anybody complaining about performance, hasn't kept up with the news and definitely hasn't tried 5.4. Huge difference on my project.

[@chelfyn]

I've never know a dev of any stripe in the professional world (worked in the industry 25 years ago) NOT have the most kick-ass machine to develop on, You need to be at least 2 years ahead of the curve for what people are actually playing on. I still can't believe we get this for free, so stop complaining you ingrate :P

[@ДНПСИгрыИСервисы]

@@chelfyn You forget about indie developers and those who are just learning. Not everyone here is a professional.

[@stickguy9109]

​@@chelfyn 🤡

[@present_artist1033]

I actually enjoyed a real, awkward person sharing the update, that felt like hearing from a developer themselves vs a rehearsed, fake personality.

[@vi6ddarkking]

Nanite Skeletal Meshes and Mega Lights have me absolutely salivating. As someone that started working with 3D in the early 2010s not having to worry about polycount is a boner worthy thought. And I always sucked with lighting, this is going to make things so much easier.

[@Variapolis]

It's important to keep in mind that nanite has some significant drawbacks like overdraw, aliasing, worse performance than good LODs, and requiring VSMs. The Unreal documentation stating that nanite should always be turned on is simply not true or good advice.

[@vi6ddarkking]

​@@Variapolis Unreal has auto LOD tools so I don't see the problem here. Besides when I want performance I use a static mesh with vertex animations.

[@dotcom4389]

@@vi6ddarkking woosh

[@Variapolis]

@@vi6ddarkking The auto lod tools aren't optimized for overdraw and can't be used in conjunction with nanite, so the auto LODs are worse than nanite, but nanite is worse than good lods, but then there's also the other drawbacks like if you use nanite you need to have VSMs enabled which can hurt performance by quite a bit alone.

[@andreaspokorny3089]

Well .. they blend you with quality - but not performance - it is a pain to watch more and more games falling for nanite and lumen. The longer they struggle with getting nanite in a competitive state the more I think that .. maybe a 3d pixel isnt a triangle, maybe media molecule was right..

[@ymi_yugy3133]

The graphics look very pretty as always. I think area lights bring UE5 one step closer to competing with path tracing as seen in Cyberpunk 2077 or Alan Wake 2. Seeing it run on console makes it even more impressive. It does seem however, like the biggest technical issue with Unreal Engines remains mostly unchanged. Difficulties around shader compilation, perversive traversal stutter, poor CPU performance and bad CPU scaling.

[@dawidbujak]

Regarding CPU - it's very true. Unfortunately some UE defaults (like components), are pretty bad for CPU. Let's hope MASS will fix this.

[@braiesteanu]

damn, the megalights were definitely impressive (and running on a ps5?) what i'm a lot more giddy about is the mobile visualizer, we need that in ALL engines

[@Cronofear]

Anyone who has tried to add lightning to an environment knows how impressive it is to have an engine that just let you add whatever light you want.

[@existentialselkath1264]

Megalights seems to solve the same problems as Nvidias raytraced direct illumination. I wonder how performance compares.

[@CaScho1975]

Nvidia also implemented a very cool thing called restir gi, which allows scene lighting without any lights but only with emissive materials. And this in almost pathtraced quality. Hope this will come, too.

[@KomodoBitGames]

After adding 200 movable point lights to the third person template I got 105 fps with screen space GI and 40-50 fps without mega lights in screen space GI. It doesn’t require lumen which is really nice and can be toggled in post process.

[@gstreetgames2530]

This megalights stuff looks amazing, but I am wary of new & emerging technology, especially from Epic. They cut a lot of corners and are relying on up-scaling to solve problems that should be fixed at the production level. Perhaps I'll be truly excited once it has proven itself as a new technology.

[@KomodoBitGames]

I tested mega lights and it’s a huge performance boost, roughly 200% performance increase

[@Freznosis]

I noticed when they are turning the lights off and on you can see the bounced lighting and reflections fade in and out even though the light instantly changes its state. But the whole engine is built like that so it’s a given. Still very cool though!

[@gstreetgames2530]

@@KomodoBitGames I'm still going to wait until at least 5.7 before I think about using this new technology in anything production wise. Luckily, I won't need to work on any levels for some time anyway.

[@Burnout3D]

So with Nanite Skeletal Meshes and Mega Lights... I can easily imagine Times Square or Shibuya Crossing being possible with all the vehicle traffic and pedestrians in UE5.5 and looking amazing.

[@ristopaasivirta9770]

My wallet has sued me for domestic abuse.

[@Cronofear]

Nanite for SK meshes? Many said it was not possible.

[@Capewearer]

The hardest part is CPU bottleneck due the high amount of vertexes being transormed on CPU (that's traditional way of performing it). It seems that they have somehow applied GPU skinning.

[@gamefromscratch]

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[@808draft]

What kind of alien technology did epic games find.

[@nahuelcutrera]

it's called fortnite, haha but the aliens still don't know how to fix stutter 😄

[@scratchos9816]

Must be something from Na Pali that's how unreal it is lol

[@charlesscholton5252]

I have been waiting forever for something like Megalights with shadows. I have had to battle with lighting for cyberpunk and dark environments forever.

[@Exzerios]

Megalights are just nuts. Nanite was quite cool, but its underlying idea wasn't something special. Lumen was cool, but then again it wasn't something completely new. But this is, oof. Were there any tech talks already about how they achieved it?

[@KomodoBitGames]

Someone said it’s stochastic lighting and a variant of a nvidia tech demo a while back. Basically they render all the individual lights as one big light.

[@indieguy7297]

Holy smokes this channel works fast

[@_tsu_]

The Ancient Egyptians built the Pyramids, Roman Empire Built the Colosseum. We made unreal engine. Shutout too all them kids that bought VBucks.

[@jtjames79]

World War 3 has started, and I'm just excited about video game engines. Mad world.

[@moravianlion3108]

Hardly. This is ruzzian Vietnam. They're fighting a war they can't win (various reasons).

[@marsmotion]

@@moravianlion3108 they are winning stop being fooled by empire media....jesus

[@poleve5409]

​@@marsmotion1. Stop sucking daddy Russia 2. Show proof

[@Ryhon]

Yay, more features that will make games look 10% better at half the framerate

[@gamefromscratch]

This is certainly true today, but with a new console generation on the horizon and the non-stop march of progress with CPUs and GPUs, this stuff will eventually be mundane.

[@B1aQQ]

And console games will still be running at 30 fps checkerboard 900p, like they do now! But with prettier colors!

[@Cronofear]

Nanite makes games look 90% better at greater distances tho? The problem is that using it now is kinda risky, but it will not be in a few years. And if you don't understand the implication of megalights as well, then idk what to tell you.

[@ДНПСИгрыИСервисы]

​@@gamefromscratch But which are becoming more expensive every year 😞

[@Variapolis]

​@@gamefromscratchexcept the constant push for TAA and DLSS will always keep it looking blurry so it will never run at a good frame rate natively because "why bother optimizing it when we can rely on the cheap temporal filter to fix all our problems with shitty ghosting and blur"

[@Kry0000]

Props to the Unreal Engine developers, that was a magnificent showcase. Thanks for sharing this.

[@Alucard_Seven]

I wasn't planning on upgrading my pc soon, but with UE 5.5 I might now lol.

[@toonphantom]

I'm very surprised that there are no AI features. I think AI in GameDev can help, but it's too early and in wrong hands it would mean much more trash games on steam. So, for me, it's something good that UE5.5 isn't an AI update

[@libshastra]

I have a feeling that Megalights will only work for a specific pipeline i.e. to get it's maximum effect, you need to use nanite, vat and megalights together. Otherwise, you will be stuck just working on optimizing the scene for megalights. Definitely need to wait a couple of months for the tech talks. Though once you understand the pipeline, it will be hell of a time saver.

[@gamefromscratch]

I actually think the earlier comment about "almost at a fully nanite rendering pipeline which will speed up peformance" was a hint that you are probably right. I bet this at the least is twinned to nanite.

[@KomodoBitGames]

It works with the third person template and in screen space GI with non nanite meshes.

[@libshastra]

@@KomodoBitGames sure it will but I think you will max your render budget sooner rather than later. Instead of being able to place 1000 light sources with non nanite meshes you will be limited to 200-300 light sources. In order to get those 1000 light sources, you will need to use nanite with vat with lumen and then you can use megalights on top of that.

[@libshastra]

@@gamefromscratch yes, I feel like Epic just wants you to stick with their pipeline in very subtle ways. It is not a bad thing, Epic's pipeline is pretty battle tested and effective.

[@karlwest437]

It does look realistic, but kinda like a scale model, if you know what I mean, like the miniature sets they used in Lord Of The Rings? Almost like it needs another level of microscopic detail?

[@vegitoblue2187]

What about long overdue World Partition and Chaos fixes?

[@sheeftz]

It feels like they do what they want to do, rather what they really need to do.

[@vegitoblue2187]

@@sheeftz Yeah just read the roadmap. Our team is mad. Why can't they just give us physx back? It still exists under the hood since the project settings show it's options.

[@sheeftz]

@@vegitoblue2187 That's the state of Unreal. They cut PhysX out before Chaos become any good. I suffer from this too. What can you do about that?

[@vegitoblue2187]

@@sheeftz We have been lookih into third party systems for vehicles. Apart from that, not rely on the physics engine at all. We would love to mod the engine and find a way around things but we lack tech to do so at the moment.

[@activemotionpictures]

hopefully they can integrate ai raytracing with that new lighting/layering shader method. THEN, it would be a game changer.

[@RyanStillGames]

Unity: Runtime fee. Godot: Rogue community manager. Unreal: *Presents actual black magic.* 😎

[@KomodoBitGames]

Tim Sweeney is a great ceo

[@mgodoi3891]

Meanwhile Unity: 😂😂😂😂

[@MrKomalarn]

They always show off Lumen in these slow moving "cinematic" shots. I would like to see it in real world gameplay where the objects move quickly, camera changes directions, etc.. But they obviously will not show that since it is ghosting like old IPS monitor.

[@MastermindAtWork]

In exchange of this cool feature, 3rd Party AAA devs and High end Indie Devs are gonna abuse this resulting in lots of shader compilation and forced to use a 30/4090 to render all this.

[@Shock2k12]

Good luck playing new games with this stuff and buying a $3000 video card soon 4070 super wont be enough for this stuff

[@pfannkuchengesicht42]

If only they could fix their frame pacing/microstutters...

[@PurpleKnightmare]

Is these demo scenes available for us to play with?

[@gamefromscratch]

They announced some of them will be coming to fab. The initial one they said they built from Quixel and .... grrr.... forget the creators name... but assets that will be up on Fab.

[@RADkate]

i do wonder how the Shadows in megalights work, i dont think is is don like conventional shadowmapping unlesss they do some insane timeslicing based on visibility and updates in the light area(thopugh looking at tit again they do graduality fade in still not sure), so i guess its some sort of raytracing via lumen, very impressive

[@KomodoBitGames]

It works with any GI, basically they combine all the lights in the scene into one and just do a single render pass instead of rendering each light as their own.

[@RADkate]

@@KomodoBitGames thats deferred lighting, has nothing todo with shadows,i dont see how you could render thousands of shadows in one pass

[@KuraiNoOni]

I was just browsing the market place to pick up this month's free assets and noticed the update icon on the library tab and was surprised they just shadow dropped the 5.5 preview. Not even 10 minutes later you released a video on the update. Curious to try out mega lights. But the real question right now: does it still ship with the "old" bridge plugin, and does it include the fab plugin( or an early access/preview build) that will be available later this month for other Engine Versions, like the one available for UEFN?

[@TheFunDimension]

Cool and and all, but all I’m saying is for this lighting system can be use in VR with no problems.

[@pwnonator]

if those mega lights were running on ps5 I'm now curious how my high-end pc will handle them. That was my fav part. Unreal engine is just so damn good.

[@victims5820]

Nice. Let's hope Twinmotion gets some love for the PT rendering as well. I get so much flickering with interior lights it's Unreal (pun intended).

[@racoonartworks]

phew.... mega lights could finally be the thing that breaks the neck of offline rendering. Nanite and lumen were all good and fine but using "unlimited" light sources like that frankly is one of the last key pieces that held us back. Can't wait to see the tech talk breakdowns of this!

[@undeadkitty334]

Where's the new programming language, I'm still waiting for that.

[@marsmotion]

theyre really getting close to being done with graphics....now we need those rubber suits that make you feel stuff lol

[@SixR6s]

i wish they would do something about Chaos Destruction :(

[@etherealregions]

I wouldn't mind seeing a few more templates. Like the side scroller template, and a few Pew, Pew templates would be nice as well. lol

[@FPChris]

Zero VR :(

[@ZackarySimmons]

I can't believe no one is talking about the built in deformer, I was literally looking into how to do this manually this morning

[@adamsmith1300]

Megaligthts - wow, I have goosebumps).

[@aaronwe9850]

I hope they add more documentation for Chaos notifications. Other than that, it looks interesting.

[@pixelasm]

#megalights for sure look like the next big thing after #nanite I am truly stoked for this update.

[@drinkwwwaterrr]

Unreal's development speed is absolutely insane. At this point there's almost no use for offline renderers unless they start implementing similar tech to make render times bearable.

[@heyheyhophop]

Megalights... Next: megatextures!! Wait.. ;D

[@DFDark2]

Megalights look truly impressive I have to say.

[@PixPunxel]

No word of that scripting language ? What was the name ?

[@gamefromscratch]

Not in the Unreal chat, they did mention Verse in the UEFN section, but I was making this video by then so didn't really hear it.

[@PixPunxel]

@@gamefromscratch Ok...it is allready in UEFN , so that is not big change ... Thanks

[@Atlantica-Worlds]

Megalights are going to be useful for creating cities.

[@bes12000]

I hope this demo will be available to play around with.

[@Tallacus]

Mmm can't wait for ML Deformer to become standard

[@JonathanTash]

I read the title as "Godot 5.5" and got confused

[@eduanca8151]

Unreal is just insane! what a beautifull light!

[@dawidbujak]

I hope they don't mind PS5 Pro

[@Emulator_Crossing]

still waiting for chaos engine in an aaa game...

[@cantpickausername]

While all the "competitions" are shooting themselves in the foot

[@jensenraylight8011]

*cough* Godot *cough*

[@IPlayKindred]

@@jensenraylight8011 haha woke!! haha woke!! get it guys! the joke is woke!!!

[@rremnar]

Because they are inferior to begin with?

[@AlexiosLair]

Let's wait how Epics will handle Fab.

[@PurpleKnightmare]

In Seattle! My home town!

[@Emulator_Crossing]

ps6 era stuff...noice.

[@ZephrusPrime]

Nanite Skeletal Mesh????

[@bexplosion]

UE preview = UE beta

[@HumiIiation]

Another one...really?

[@IstyManame]

Megalights and nanite are cool. Most of everything else was shit. 2 hours of automotive, film, and devs licking ue's ass. The engine needs baseline optimizations, none of the new features can be comfortably run for most gamers

[@samkip208]

Megalights!!!!

[@sametver7925]

incredible!

[@GamerForLife514]

Amazing.

[@lucazfc]

no verse =(

[@thereisnospace]

what the hell just happened? unreal just "finished" graphics.. thats whats happened.

[@gamefromscratch]

Honestly this is one of the last major barriers to... the uncanny valley aint as deep as it once was.

[@ilijastjepanovic2975]

Please bring a Solution when using Blender rigged modells in Unreal Engine. The axis are totally different and always a pain to fix that.

[@marsmotion]

cant you change that axis orient in blender settings?

[@ilijastjepanovic2975]

@@marsmotion somehow there is also the problem. Its programmed to use this axis. Import from Blender to Godot works fine but no easy to Unreal Engine. Hopeful there is a uncomplicated solution.

[@egioch]

Moving from Godot to Unreal.

[@IPlayKindred]

good for you

[@vickylance]

Unreal is real good for 3d games but if you do only 2d Games Godot is still on top

[@GorblinRat]

Woke for the win

[@acgumut]

Pro tip: Buy a spare GPU just in case.

[@gstreetgames2530]

@@GorblinRat They are both 'woke' all modern corporate game companies are. Most of tech is infested with wimps, simps, blimps, and crimps.

[@ped-away-g1396]

I wish there was a way to just take UE5's rendering engine and put it into blender.

[@sanketvaria9734]

Only supported for RTX 5090 probably

[@AetherMomon]

No, you’re wrong. They literally said in the video that it was running on a PS5, which is less powerful than even an RTX 4070

[@dotcom4389]

its been a while since using U5, and i was excited to try it but it didn't take long to remind me why i dislike it regardless of its fancy features. That is importing and asset management. what a pile of sh*t. I tried to import an asset i purchased off CGTrader and it had a Unity version and UE version. ok downloaded UE and dragged it in.. spam errors all of the place. answered the questions and then to my surprise, even though these were UE materials, it didn't set the textures. so i would now have to select each material (total of 80) and then assign all textures to each slot. probably will be done in an hour of frustration anger. So i decided to right click the folder of this asset file and clicked delete. NOTHING HAPPENED.. I KID YOU NOT PEOPLE. AFTER 10 F**KING YEARS OF DEVS COMPLAINING ABOUT THIS THEY STILL CANT FIX A SIMPLE DELETE OF ASSETS.

[@CaScho1975]

How does Megalights compare to NVidias RTX Branch of the engine? Same tech or own stuff? What about emissive materials (called "restir gi" in rtx branch 5.4).

[@rremnar]

They need to stop adding features, and improve the engine itself. If I go back to Unreal Engine, it will be the latest 4.x version.

[@EdwardPerkins-x8r]

Second ! Edit: Third technically.

[@tyreelowe6667]

First. Edit: Second, technically.

[@lx2222x]

We need Mover 2.0!!!!!