Several engines now share the lucrative video game market. Among the most used in the world, we can cite Unity, Source, Cryengine and Gamebryo. But the one that has the largest market share today is the Unreal Engine. And Epic Games demonstrated its capabilities during a conference in Seattle.
It’s still stunningly realistic.
This week Unreal Fest 2024 took place in Seattle, an event which, as its name suggests, aims to promote the Epic Games engine with conferences, workshops and other presentations for three days.
It was during the opening conference that version 5.5 of Unreal Engine was presented in detail with a technical demo of around 5 minutes on a new feature, followed by concrete examples of use of the new version. .
Thus we were presented with Megalights, a tool which allows the use of orders of magnitude more lights than ever before, mobile and dynamic with realistic shadow management as well as volumetric fog management.
In the demo, a hero called Echo navigates a scene lit by over 1,000 lights casting shadows in real time. The demonstrator plays with a PS5 controller and specifies at the end that the demo actually runs on a PS5. We do not know which model it is, however, it could be the PS5 Pro.
In all cases, the demo runs in real time and uses Quixel Megascans as well as KitBash 3D elements. As usual, the demo is impressive, but we wonder when this kind of scene will be possible in a video game, and even more so on console.
