If you’ve been eagerly awaiting a production-ready release of Unreal Engine 5 the time has come to install UE5 Preview 1  and explore its potential. It’s still not final but it has come a long way.

Since Epic Games released the Early Access version of Unreal Engine 5, on May 2021, the team behind the game engine turned Virtual Production essential tool has been busy. Fortnite, a popular game from Epic Games which is also a showcase for UE is now built on Unreal Engine 5, and the team also created a technical demo The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience with the code. These internal efforts, says Epic Games, “were designed to make Unreal Engine 5 more production-ready, stable, and optimized.”

The developers are currently working towards the final shipping version, with all features that they intend to include now ready for testing. In addition to many improvements to previously exposed tools like Nanite, Lumen, One File Per Actor, World Partition, and MetaSounds, Epic Games says “you’ll find some exciting new animation tools, groundwork support for Large World Coordinates, and much more.”

Before you install the Preview 1 version and start to work, one word of caution, directly from Epic Games: “We should stress that Preview releases will still have instabilities and other issues, and should not be used for production. We suggest making a copy of existing projects if you wish to use them to experiment with the new tools and workflows. However, we’d love for you to put them through their paces to help us identify any remaining glitches, so that we can get them fixed for the final release. Please log any issues you encounter on our bug reporting page.”

An invitation to creators from all industries

Unreal Engine 5 Early Access was focused on exposing new features for next-gen game development. With this Preview release, Epic Games invites creators from all industries to take it for a test-drive. One caveat, though: while you should be able work in UE5 much the same way as you have been able to do in UE4, with your existing workflows supported, some of the major new features such as Lumen and Nanite have not yet been validated with non-games workflows.

Nonetheless, Epic Games continues, “you should enjoy a redesigned Unreal Editor, better performance, an extended geometry editing toolset, improved Path Tracing, and more! There’s plenty for you to get your teeth into, and we look forward to hearing your feedback.”

Besides many improvements to stability, quality, performance, and tools already available in UE, the  most recent version includes an extensive series of new features that expand the potential for the game engine. Follow the link to know more about some key highlights to watch out in Unreal Engine 5 Preview 1. You can also check out a complete list of updates included in Preview 1 in the Unreal Engine 5 Preview forum topic. Epic Games invites users to share their general feedback and report bugs on this and subsequent Preview releases there.