How Unreal is Changing for the Next Witcher and Cyberpunk

CD Projekt Red, the creators of the Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077, moved over to Unreal Engine 5 for all of their future projects from their in house game engine called REDengine. At Unreal Fest Prague Jaroslaw Rudzki, Senior Core Engineer of CD Projekt Red, gave a talk about how his team is optimizing Unreal for large open world streaming.

Streaming is the process of loading in and loading out assets as the player is traversing. To optimize this process, CD Projekt Red created their own version of actors and components that removes a lot of the unnecessary overhead the team doesn’t plan on using. They created their own render proxy with help by Epic, decoupling object rendering from the default actor and component. This gives CD Projekt Red the option to create their own systems in the engine optimized specifically for their games called TurboTech.

I recommend watching the full talk by Rudzki. It is a great look to see how triple A studios with an engineering team approach using Unreal.

Large game studios working with Epic benefit indie developers because the improvements made to the Engine are often added to Unreal. Some of the tech Epic created to help CD Projekt Red was recently added to the Engine in UE5.4!

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Here is an amazing environment build by Che Hsuan Tsao which is almost entirely placed by Procedural Content Generation. You can read more about it on his artstation post. While PCG is still in early access, we continue to see amazing environment builds using it. Every new Unreal update adds a ton of more features to make PCG easier to use. For example recursive subgraphs and a biome generator was introduced in UE5.4.

The real test for PCG is whether it can generate a city like from the Matrix City demo. Generating the city using Houdini is what inspired Epic to create PCG. So that this process could be done in Engine and not in a separate program. I imagine Epic will show off a PCG city in the future to demonstrate its power.

Next week I will breakdown my thoughts on the Tim Sweeney Unreal Engine 6 interview and what it could mean for Epic and Unreal going into the future.

See you next time,

Zach Hunter

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