As of April 5, Unreal Engine 5 has been fully released and is available to all developers for free. The release of a new version of Unreal Engine also means the start of a new era. After all, UE has come up with innovations that will drive the industry forward in every version and will continue to be the engine behind countless successful games.
So we wanted to take this opportunity to take a closer look at the development of this software wonder, which has now left behind four versions and nearly twenty-five years. In this way, we can see once again where the games come from.
Unreal Engine (1998)
The first Unreal Engine to be written for unreal game came when Tim Sweeney, the founder and current CEO of Epic Games, did most of it alone. Sweeney started writing the engine in 1995 and sold the license to several companies in 1996, but the engine was first introduced in 1998 with Unreal.
The first Unreal Engine, which comes with features such as 16-bit color depth, texture filtering that makes the textures of models look better, volumetric fog, collision detection that detects the collision of objects, was more prominent with visual innovations. However, this visual success brought with it performance problems. Tim Sweeney created a more advanced engine with Steve Polge at the Unreal Tournament, released in 1999 due to performance and network issues.
Technology demo released between Unreal Engine 1 and 2
The fact that Unreal Tournament also came to Linux, Mac, PlayStation 2 and Dreamcast in the following years also showed that Unreal Engine has a flexible structure and has increased the number of suitors. Deus Ex, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, The Wheel of Time used this engine. Tim Sweeney also saw the potential in the market and positioned UE as an important part of company policy.
Unreal Engine 2 (2002)
The second version began in 1999, not long after the first version. In addition to its visual advantages, mixed physics engine and skeleton animation features, which they signed and added with a third-party company, came to the fore in this engine. In addition, various tools such as better rendering, cinematic editing tool and support for integration with popular modeling programs 3DS Max, Maya have made this engine very attractive to companies.
Unreal Tournament 2004
The first fruit of Unreal Engine 2, which can now offer a solution in every sense, both visuals, physics and animations, came in 2002. America;s Army, developed by the U.S. military (yes, the army as we know it), was the first product made with Unreal Engine 2. However, we know the engine mostly through productions such as Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Bioshock 1 and 2, Unreal Tournament 2004, Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood, Killing Floor.
In 2005, Unreal Engine released a major update and continued with UE2.5. Better rendering, better vehicle physics by Rocket League’s developers through individual efforts, and the arrival of 64-bit support for Unreal Tournament 2004 were the highlights of the new update. Epic Games also released a customized side version for theXbox called UE2X during this period.
Until the end of 2013, we saw the release of games using Unreal Engine 2. Considering that Unreal Engine 4 was about to be released that year, we can say that UE 2 had a very long lifespan.
Unreal Engine 3 (2006)
UE 3, one of the most prolific versions of UE history in terms of gaming, was developed in 2003. The sound system, physics system, various vehicles used in unreal engine 2 have been presented to the developers in a completely refurbished manner.
In addition, major improvements were made to lighting and shadows. Examples of these major improvements include pixel-based lighting (per pixel lightning), dynamic shadowing, high dynamic range rendering.
Designed specifically for Windows (with DirectX 9/10 support), PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, Unreal Engine 3 has been supported by iOS and Android in the coming years. In addition, the UE3 was not only used for game making. We have also seen UE 3 in various fields such as construction design, driving simulations, training simulations.
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Unreal Engine 3 Samatarian technology demo
But of course we know this engine through games, and the number of games using it is quite high. As an example (a deep breath); The Mass Effect series, Batman Arkham series, the first three Gears of War, Outlast 1-2, Borderlands 1-2, Mortal Kombat 11, Singularity, Homefront, Bulletstorm, Spec Ops: The Line, XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2, DmC: Devil May Cry. These examples can be increased much more, but you already understand how efficient this engine is.
Unreal Engine 4 (2014)
UE 4, which has successfully maintained the great success of Unreal Engine 3 to date, was developed in 2005, before UE 3 had even reached its full release. Tim Sweeney’s new release, which began with solo research at the time, accelerated with the gradual involvement of the UE 3 team in the following years, and in 2012, we saw the new version for the first time at the GDC.
Gears of War 4 (2016)
Unreal Engine 4 includes dozens of useful tools, from tools for visual ephemerals (VFX) to audio tools and character animation tools. One of the most prominent solutions is environmental illumination. This solution, which is especially used with hardware-based Ray Tracing, now allows games to have a much more natural lighting.
Many games that are not yet released today are already using UE 4; That’s why we’ve seen constant updates to this day. Examples include VR editor, DirectX 12 support. In this way, various demos were made to show how powerful the engine is, especially visually. With these demos, we’ve seen what mario, world of warcraft, league of legends can look like in UE 4. In fact, Unreal Engine 4, the “green screen” of The Mandalorian; OK. In this way, the series team prepared a virtual set environment instead of a green curtain, both getting rid of the green screen and completing the necessary digital processes on stage more easily through Unreal Engine 4.
An image from the set of The Mandalorian
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UE4 Elemental Demo
With this version, Epic Games first went to the subscription system and charged as much as $19 per month. Of course, it’s just to use the engine. Epic Games also receives an additional 5% of your revenue (excluding the Epic Games Store), even if your game has earned $1 million. After the subscription system continued until March 2015, Epic Games made Unreal Engine 4 free for everyone, despite earning more through it.
The first game to debut with Unreal Engine 4 was Daylight in 2014. Examples of popular games using this engine (another deep breath) include Gears of War 4, Gears 5, Dead by Daylight, Street Fighter V, Little Nightmares 1-2, Psychonauts 2, Returnal, It Takes Two, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Kingdom Hearts III, Days Gone. Productions such as Gotham Knights, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Payday 3, which have yet to meet with actors, also benefit from UE 4.
Unreal Engine 5 (2022)
Although we think about what more can be done with the great solutions and platform support that Unreal Engine 4 brings, graphics programmers can find optimal solutions/improvements, especially with the strengthening of the hardware. That’s what we saw with Unreal Engine 5.
In May 2020, Epic Games introduced the engine with a demo running on PlayStation 5. The demo focused specifically on Lumen and Nanite technologies. Nanite is a technology that allows models with hundreds of millions of polygons to be able to directly incorporate into the engine without the need for any optimization. Lumen is a tool that provides dynamic environmental lighting. In this way, the developers will not be interested in preparing light maps, pre-processing for certain scenes, but the dynamic environmental lighting provided by Lumen will solve such errands.
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Unreal Engine 5 technology demo
Epic Games also introduced MetaHuman Creator, a cloud-based tool where you can design photo-realistic people. In this way, both the development process will be reduced and we will be able to see human modeling and animations that are very close to reality in new games. We even saw it with The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience, released in December last year.
One of the points to mention in the demo is that the city was built by a small team thanks to the features provided by Unreal Engine 5. With this feature, it is possible to quickly change the architecture, structure and even traffic density of the city. Now even small teams will be able to produce AAA-level products, says Epic Games.
In the opening scene of The Matrix demo, film content and real-time images were used simultaneously
Even these features alone in Unreal Engine 5 make us look great at what awaits us. Over the years, as the engine evolves further, there is no doubt that as new games come out with new solutions, we will see much more impressive content.
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