State of Unreal Recap

Hi everyone 🙌,

Last week was the State of Unreal! Where Epic showcased a bunch of new features coming to Unreal Engine. In case you missed it, you can watch a recap of the event here.  

You can watch a summary of the event on the channel where I cover PCG Biomes, Nanite Displacement, Motion Matching, Metahumans for Fortnite and more!

For the rest of this week’s newsletter, I will share my thoughts on two important announcements I did not mention in the video.

The Epic Games store was officially announced for iOS and Android, but only in Europe. Recently, the European Union passed the Digital Markets Act which allows developers to create their own appstores to compete with the App Store, something Epic has been advocating for. Despite this new act opening up the ecosystem, Apple initially banned Epic from creating apps in Europe. Apple unbanned Epic after resistance from European regulators. You can read more about what transpired in the previous week’s newsletter.

Developer’s can bypass Apple’s fees of 30% of revenue and enjoy the same low fees as the Epic Games Store online. If the store gains traction in Europe, it will be a no-brainer to upload your game there over the App Store. Epic will continue to lobby other government’s to follow Europe’s leads. In fact, Epic’s CEO, Tim Sweeney could not attend this year’s State of Unreal since he was in Australia, giving testimony in a lawsuit their attempting to open up the ecosystem.

Epic will release a new sample project for the Unreal Editor for Fortnite called the Talisman, which is the most detailed environment yet created in UEFN. You can watch this tech talk they held after the State of Unreal, where they broke down how they were able to create such an expansive environment in UEFN.

Most of the talk by the team was how to create complex environments while being under the 400 MB limit required for every UEFN map. Demos for UE5, like the Valley of the Ancients and Electric Dreams, have sizes between 60 to 120 gigabyte. In comparison the Talisman demo is just under half a gigabyte. To achieve this they made heavy use of kitbashing, tileable materials, and procudural wear and tear. The team discovered a new Unreal workflow for creating environments in the process, I highly recommend watching the talk to learn more.

I look forward to breaking open the project and applying the tech made there in UEFN and UE5 maps.

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Until next time,

Zach Hunter