Unreal Engine 5.1 has already been released and these are its news

Recently the release of the new version 5.1 was announced from the popular game engine Unreal Engine, version that brings a lot of new features and improvements to the engine.

It should be noted that this version incorporates improvements for Lumen, the global illumination system, Nanite, the geometry system based on micro polygons and virtual shadow maps. The goal is to deliver games that run at 60 FPS for the latest generation consoles.

More specifically, developers have added the ability to reprogram the Nanite rasterizer, in particular to allow the creation of deformations to reproduce the movement caused by the wind in the foliage. Additionally, opacity masks can also be changed on the fly.

Main new features of Unreal Engine 5.1

This new version that comes from Unreal Engine 5.1 implemented a cache for DirectX 12 pipeline state objects, which simplifies the production of a DirectX 12 game, thus also, the compilation of shaders is done as needed, which allows the engine to be more responsive.

Another of the changes that stands out in the new version is that Features related to creating giant worlds have been improved. Notably, the engine supports coordinate systems of these huge worlds without loss of precision. Additionally, it is possible to create parts of worlds to improve version tracking. Finally, a new level of hierarchical detail allows a wide scope while reducing memory usage.

Engine performance has also been improved for live event workflows, this includes a new visual effects editor and better rendering of nDisplay screens, plus added a Soundscape module to procedurally generate ambient sounds In the scene.

On the AI ​​side, smart objects and state trees are now stable (ready for production). The “MassEntity” module is in beta. These tools allowed for the creation of the demo set in the world of the Matrix.

In addition to this, this new version of Unreal Engine 5.1 adds a series of functions to improve the efficiency of game developers and other large-scale interactive projects, helping teams be more productive.

With Virtual Assets it is mentioned that metadata has been decoupled from object data, allowing developers to sync only what they need from source control systems like Perforce, resulting in smaller workspaces and faster syncs for developers who don't need access to the entire data object. Initially, this feature will support textures and audio assets, with the intention of adding more types in the future.

The new one is also mentioned HLOD (Hierarchical Level of Detail) support for rendering and streaming water with which you can create large bodies of water with better performance and a smaller memory footprint.

Si you want to know more in detail about this new release, you can check the following link, where I know they list and describe all the news of Unreal Engine 5.1.

How to install Unreal Engine on Linux?

For those who are interested in being able to install this game engine, The easiest way to do this is by creating an account on GitHub and epic games.

With which we will request access from the following link. To be able to download the necessary files.

Once this is done, just run in a terminal, where it will ask us for our GitHub username and password:

git clone https://github.com/3dluvr/UnrealEngine.git

Done this, we execute the scripts:

cd UnrealEngine

./Setup.sh

./GenerateProjectFiles.sh

If everything went well and we had no problems with dependencies, let's build the Unreal Engine editor with:

make SlateViewer

make UE4Editor ARGS=-clean

make ShaderCompileWorker UnrealLightmass UnrealPak CrashReportClient UE4Editor

This takes a long time, but you can see how it progresses. Once the whole process is finished and without failures, we can run the editor of this graphic engine with the following command:

cd Engine/Binaries/Linux && ./UE4Editor

And you're done with it, you can start using the engine.