Programmer Ramblings – Initial Thoughts on UE5

This one’s going to be kind of all over the place, and it’s mostly going to be based on the things that I’ve been seeing doing an initial pass at experimenting in UE5. It’s out an available to start messing around with, whether precompiled on the EGS launcher or through Github source. I went with the latter.

An Unreal Engine major upgrade is always a big deal for me. I’ve been working in Unreal for a long time, so making that step forward is always a mix of familiarity with the old style and figuring out what’s new. My timeline with Unreal looks like this:

Unreal Engine 2.x

  • Unreal Demolition – 2004-2006, UT2004 mod in Unreal Engine 2.5

Unreal Engine 3

  • Unreal Demolition – 2007-2010, UT3 mod
  • ARC Squadron / ARC Squadrox: Redux – 2011-2013 UE3 game on iOS, Android, Fire OS
  • Rocket League – 2013 – Initial work getting the game ported to non-Windows platforms
  • Cancelled mobile project – 2013-2014, engine and tool improvements to modernize UE3 on mobile for cancelled internal project
  • Smite – 2014-2016 – Gameplay engineer manager and generalist for console ports
  • Killing Floor 2 – 2017 – Gameplay engineer

Unreal Engine 4

  • Hand of the Gods – 2016-2017 – Protoyped in UE3, ported to UE4 for public release
  • Studio R&D – 2017-2018 – Worked on internal prototypes and R&D for UE4 between KF2 and Maneater projects
  • Maneater – 2018-2019 – Gameplay lead for multiplatform project
  • Squanch projects – 2019 – present. Studio has continued using UE4 for internal projects since I arrived. Beyond its use in Trover Saves the Universe, the development team in general has a lot of previous history with Unreal.

Because Unreal has been so key to my career, I jumped in to UE5 the second I had a chance and have been messing around since. This ramblings is basically the things that have stood out to me so far in my digging around for the past few days.