Introducing Unreal Engine 5

Unreal Engine 5, or Unreal for short, is a game engine developed by Epic Games. Unreal, as with any other game engine at its core, simply processes data from files and instructions into data that you can see on the screen. The suite of tools provided are designed to assist you in creative and predictable tasks. Having been created for you by elite programmers and designers, it is like outsourcing your development to the big leagues.

However, like a high-performance racing car driven by a learner, even the best tools can perform badly. The experts at Epic didn’t know how you would use their tools. So, when we design our code architecture, we need to keep this break in communications in mind. This is where this book comes in, teaching the expected best practices when writing games in Unreal Engine 5.

Unreal Engine has powered an impressive list of gaming titles covering a vast array of genres, shipping on a multitude of platforms.

Unreal Engine 3 powered some of the biggest hits from the seventh generation of game consoles, ranging from third-person shooter games such as the Gears of War series developed by Epic Games themselves to fighting games such as Injustice: Gods Among Us and Mortal Kombat from NetherRealm, as well as strategy games including the XCOM series developed by Firaxis Games.

The eighth generation of consoles saw Unreal Engine 4 expand its portfolio to include racing titles such as the MotoGP games from Milestone and Assetto Corsa Competizione from Kunos Simulazioni, as well as facilitating the hugely popular introduction of the Battle Royale genre with PlayerUnknowns’ Battlegrounds (PUBG Studios), which is listed as the fifth highest-selling video game on Wikipedia, and Epic Games’ Fortnite, which transitioned to Unreal Engine 5 in December 2021 as detailed in Chapter 3.

Unreal Engine 5 features a series of new, key technologies, including Nanite, a sub-mesh level of detail system allowing massive polycount models to render with even screen-space hull size at any distance, and Lumen, a real-time lighting solution that mixes mesh distance fields and atlassed local surface data progressively over time to create a realistic lighting effect at low cost. These new technologies drove the transition from 4.26/4.27 to 5.0 as part of a complete rework of Unreal’s rendering technology. The engine had an impactful debut with the release of The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine Experience, a demo featuring photorealistic likenesses of Carrie-Anne Moss and Keanu Reeves, and an open-world city featuring impressive examples of crowd and traffic simulations.

Increasingly, games studios are opting to replace proprietary in-house developed game engines with Unreal Engine 5; studios such as CD Projekt Red (The Witcher) and Crystal Dynamics (Tomb Raider) have announced the decision to use Unreal Engine 5 in the latest installments of their game series.

Now that we’ve covered a little about Unreal Engine’s past, pedigree, and influence on gaming history, we will get things set up next so that you are ready to use Unreal Engine 5 with C++.