Juan Cañada on Epic Gamesin graafisen suunnittelun johtaja ja hän piti äskettäin puheen osana Madridia Gamen El Tardeo -sessioissa kouluttaakseen nuoria kehittäjiä. Gamereactor osallistui tapahtumaan ja toimittajallamme oli ilo kuvata seuraava haastattelu kokeneen kehittäjän kanssa kaikesta Unreal Engineä koskevasta:
Vaikka asiat tuntuvat vielä hyvin uusilta, voimme sanoa, että olemme Playstation 5:n ja Xbox Seriesin kotikonsoliaikakauden keskitasoa, joten halusimme kysyä Unreal Engine 5:n nykyisestä käytöstä eri studioissa ja projekteissa. Halusimme tietää, kuinka monet heistä käyttävät edelleen voimakkaasti räätälöityjä UE4-ratkaisuja, vaikka UE5:n oli tarkoitus olla yksi nykyisen sukupolven pelien ajureista.
"Yeah, well the transition takes years", points out Cañada in the video. "Game companies cannot switch to another engine all of a sudden. It's going great, the adoption of Unreal Engine 5 is pretty incredible. We work on a number of demos since 2020 when we announced Unreal Engine 5, a demo called Rebirth, then another demo called The Matrix Awakens, and I cannot share numbers but those demos brought a lot of people to Unreal Engine 5".
"It's just that creating a big game takes time", he continues, "so the games that you see now have been developed with previous versions of Unreal. The games you will see in the future will be developed with Unreal Engine 5".
Tekniikan asiantuntijoille ohjaaja tarkensi, mitä UE5-teknologiat, kuten Lumen ja Nanite, lisäävät peliin.
"For the final user, for the person who's playing the game, it's all about quality (...) But for game developers, differences in workflow are huge", he underlines.
"Lumen is a dynamic lighting system which gives you global illumination in real time, so you don't need to bake anymore. Before Lumen, you had to pre-bake all the lighting and something called static baking, static lighting. You have to bake that information of lighting to textures, and you had to deal with a very annoying and slow process: Every time you change geometry, you need to re-bake things".
"Regarding Nanite, apart from giving you an astonishing amount of quality, because you can zoom in on the geometry and you see a lot of detail that you only saw in film before, you can forget about things like LODs, level of details", Cañada explains. "In the past, when you modelled something like a house, a building, you had to create different versions of the model that were loaded with more or less polygons, depending on how far the camera was. That was very annoying, very hard to maintain, and that's over too with Nanite because Nanite makes that process automatic: You just load the model with cinematographic quality, all the resolution you can afford, and then Nanite works under the hood, creating the perfect performance version of it, depending on where the camera is".
Katso koko video saadaksesi lisätietoja Unreal Enginen sovelluksista eri aloilla tai kuinka sillä oli melko mielenkiintoinen kaksisuuntainen suhde Fortniten kanssa.