Mario Bautista
Something to look forward to: Unreal Fest 2024 kicked off this week in Seattle with guest speakers from Epic Games and other developers discussing everything Unreal Engine. Among the more exciting topics is UE5 hitting its version 5.5 milestone and Valorant moving from UE4 to UE5.
On Tuesday, Riot Games announced that it is porting Valorant to Unreal Engine 5. The game currently runs on Unreal 4.27. Executive Producer Anna Donlon said that the engine upgrade would not bring any visual or performance changes – at least not at first.
Converting Valorant to Unreal Engine 5 is already enough of a chore. So, Riot likely wants to get the game running on UE5 without complications before tackling the task of applying any of the engine’s new features.
Donlon also vaguely mentioned several upcoming “Valorant experiences” but didn’t elaborate further (below). It’s not likely she was alluding to a sequel. However, we could see one or more spinoffs set in the Valorant universe or titles in another media altogether, like a TV series, but that’s pure speculation.
Meanwhile, Epic Games launched a preview version of Unreal Engine 5.5 today. The milestone release introduces many new elements, allowing video and triple-A game developers to unleash unprecedented high-fidelity effects effortlessly.
One of the more impressive features Epic highlighted was MegaLights. It demonstrated the technology during Unreal Fest’s opening session using the Lunen in the Land of Nanite tech demo running on a PlayStation 5 (below). MegaLights allows developers to use “orders of magnitude” more high-quality shadow-casting lights.
The demo showed the engine rendering complex lighting – like that you would find on a TV screen – in a realistic manner. It creates soft, colored light that gently glazes surfaces appropriately while casting even softer shadows, as expected with such lighting.
Epic uses a market street to contrast regular lighting with MegaLights. The difference is night and day (no pun intended). The effect is more natural because every light disperses and casts the appropriate shadows. So how many lights can it handle?
Epic lit up the entire market square with everything from strings of tiny lights to a tower of television monitors and robotic drones flying around. Those, plus all the shop lights it demonstrated before, amounted to over 1,000 individual light sources rendered accurately with shadows in real-time on the PS5 without a noticeable drop in the frame rate.
MegaLights is not the only new feature coming to Unreal 5.5. Epic has added or upgraded over 66 features, including skeletal mesh weighting, path tracer volumetrics, render pass improvements, spline meshes, pathfinding, and a ton more. You can see a list of changes with explanations and demonstrations on the Unreal Roadmap. The engine is already available for download, but remember that many of the changes are still under development and are at an experimental point in the build.
