Angelic Joins the Ranks of Unreal Engine 5

We are proud to announce that we have completed our transition from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5 to reach the excellence in graphics that our game Angelic deserves.

We like to share the development milestones we reach for Angelic with our community. In this article, we wanted to talk about Unreal Engine 5 and its advantages for our game.

Our Technical Director Petar Kotevski briefly talks about the transition in the Inside Angelic episode Science Behind the Game. You can watch it here:

What is Unreal Engine?

Developed by Epic Games, Unreal Engine is a 3D computer graphics game engine. Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney began building the code that would eventually be showcased in the 1998 FPS game Unreal in the early 90s. After seeing teasers of the game, other developers became very interested in the engine and wanted to use it. Thus, Epic began working on the development of UE in 1995 and licensed it in 1996. They continued building games using the evolving toolset, among which are Fortnite, Gears of War, and Infinity Blade. Unreal Engine has been used in different genres of games and adopted by other industries, especially film and television. It also supports a wide variety of desktop, console, mobile, and virtual reality platforms.

Unreal Engine 5

Epic released Unreal Engine 5 in April 2022. UE5 is a complete suite of creation tools for game development, linear film, and television content creation, architectural and automotive visualization, broadcast and live event production, training and simulation, and other real-time applications.

Through UE5, game developers and creators from different industries can realize next-generation real-time 3D content and experiences with greater freedom, fidelity, and flexibility.

UE5 possesses new and upgraded features that allow game devs and other creators to design more realistic 3D objects, people, and surfaces and create more natural lighting and spatial audio effects. The new iteration makes it possible to have objects as detailed as your eyes can perceive and brings real world like lighting.

At the heart of UE5 is a graphics rendering technology called Nanite. Depending on the significance of objects to the scene and their proximity to the POV of the audience, Nanite intelligently adds more or less detail to objects. Thus, graphics chip memory is spent on things that actually affect the things you see.

The new intelligent scene illumination system Lumen automatically takes care of the lighting and reflections in a scene so that the designer can achieve a lot more in a shorter amount of time. Before Lumen, you would need to simulate illumination in an offline process, and making changes to the scene was a tedious process. Now, the lighting effects shift with the camera’s relation to the scene’s geometry and work in real-time.

So what are the advantages of transitioning from UE4 to UE5 for Angelic?

Our Senior Developer Martin Petkovski explains:

The biggest reason by a large margin is that we got improved visual quality without doing almost anything, using the new Nanite and Lumen features that UE5 offers. Nanite enables us to have models which retain the amount of details and the overall visual fidelity without having to make different models and textures for objects that are small or distant. Lumen gives us easy control over indirect lighting, making our exceptional environments even better with minimal adjustments.

The new UE5 editor offers many new features, making editing much easier for artists and designers. There are many new things that engineers can expose from code to the editor so that designers can keep their focus on delivering a better gameplay experience instead of worrying about technical details. We are currently in the process of revamping our custom ability editor using the new features making the design iterations quicker and easier to do.

Unreal Engine 5, even in its current state, is much more stable and reliable than the older versions. We already fixed some obscure issues that were difficult to trace using the old debugging systems that relied on the older versions of the engine.

This concludes our brief dive into a general overview of Unreal Engine 5 and its benefits for Angelic. We are working hard to make our game the best it can be for our players and will continue to share exciting milestones with our community. Stay tuned!