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Valley of the Aboriginal is a brusque gameplay segment demonstrating early admission features in Unreal Engine 5. Players command Repeat, who appeared in the UE5 announcement trailer, as she explores an barren mural and finds a portal to a mysterious dark realm. Within, she navigates through a series of obstacles and battles the massive Ancient Ane. This sample provides a snapshot of the many quality of life features, rendering enhancements, and workflow innovations available in UE5.
This certificate will accept you on a guided tour through these exciting new features, and how the team at Ballsy Games used them to both push the limits of what is possible with real-time rendering technology while also greatly streamlining the workflow for building a vast, high-fidelity scene.
Overview
The highlights of Valley of the Ancient include:
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Loftier-stop visuals rendered with Nanite and Lumen.
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A large globe crafted with a library of Megascans assets and our new geometry tools.
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Destructible assets created with an improved Anarchy fracture workflow.
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New paradigms for organizing level files and actors that make it easier to interact with many squad members on i map.
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Flexible existent-time animation using full-trunk Inverse Kinematics (IK) and motion warping to fit character motion with gameplay.
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Modular gameplay systems that can be loaded and unloaded in their entirety at runtime.
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Procedural audio furnishings created using the new MetaSounds system.
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A dynamic music system using Quartz to synchronize gameplay and music.
Accessing the Valley of the Ancient Sample
You can download both the Unreal Engine 5 Early Access build and the Valley of the Ancient sample in the UE5 tab in the Epic Games Launcher.
Click to enlarge image.
Scroll downwards to the entry labeled Sample project showcases new features in UE5 and click Become the Sample to download it.
Recommended Arrangement Specs
This sample is peculiarly graphically intensive, and requires a powerful video menu to run at a stable framerate. Nosotros also recommend installing it on an SSD, every bit Nanite and Virtual Textures depend on fast read speeds for the best possible results. The recommended hardware specifications are every bit follows:
| Recommended Arrangement Specs (100% Screen Percentage) | Minimum System Specs (50% Screen Percent) |
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Nanite is only supported by Nvidia Maxwell generation GPUs and AMD GCN generation GPUs or college. Make sure you besides accept the most up to date drivers for your graphics menu.
On lower spec systems, you lot tin adapt the viewport screen per centum setting to get better operation. On the minimum spec, we recommend 50% or lower. Yous can gear up this in the Viewport Options Carte du jour located in the upper-left corner of your editor viewport, using the Screen Pct slider.
Alternatively, y'all tin use the console command r.ScreenPercentage to set this value at runtime.
Familiarizing Yourself With the UE5 Editor
While the Unreal Editor in UE5 retains all the functionality from Unreal Engine 4, it has several workflow and user feel improvements which yous should familiarize yourself with briefly before exploring the Valley of the Aboriginal sample.
For more comprehensive information about changes to the UE5 editor, refer to Editor Improvements. This section will summarize changes relevant to exploring this sample.
The Content Drawer
The Content Drawer is located in the lower left corner of the editor. You tin click the button for the Content Drawer, or you can press CTRL+Spacebar to summon and dismiss information technology.
Clicking Dock in Layout will also create a permanently docked Content Browser, similarly to how it functioned in UE4. You can simultaneously use both a docked Content Browser and the Content Drawer, and you lot can also manage Content Browsers by clicking the Content dropdown in the principal toolbar. This increases the flexibility of the content browser and provides more usable screen existent estate within the editor when information technology is non in apply.
The Content Browser itself has a revised layout with a folder tree permanently displayed on the left paw side, as well as a new Settings menu where you can configure how it displays avails, including view types, thumbnail sizes, and content filters.
Accessing Editor Modes
Yous tin can now toggle Editor Modes using the icons in the primary toolbar.
This includes modes that will be familiar to UE4 users, as well as several new modes with powerful new features. They are as follows:
| Number | Editor Style | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Select | The default editing fashion for selecting avails in the game earth and editing their Details. |
| 2 | Landscape | Sculpt, paint, and manage landscapes. |
| 3 | Foliage | Paint and adjust foliage inside your environment. |
| iv | Mesh Painting | Tools for vertex painting on meshes in your surroundings. Supports colors, weights, or textures. |
| 5 | Fracture | Tools for generating fractures in Static Meshes using the Chaos destruction organization. |
| 6 | Castor Editing | Classic brush geometry editor. Apply the pen tool to describe brushes in orthogonal viewports, then use other tools to refine shapes equally desired. |
| 7 | Animation | Tools for manipulating Control Rigs, quickly applying poses, and setting up simple tweens. |
| 8 | Modeling | A full polygonal geometry editing suite. Model from basic primitives or alter individual meshes in your game globe. |
Navigating the Sample
When the sample opens, it volition start in the Startup map. Near content for the Valley of the Ancient is contained in the AncientWorld map, which yous can find in the AncientContent > Maps folder.
Almost files supporting this world are located in the game's Content directory, but the assets for the Hover Drone and Ancient One are contained in Game Feature Plugins separated from the game'south base project. The Hover Drone's assets are contained in the HoverDrone Content directory, while the Light Dart ability and the battle with the Ancient 1 are contained in the AncientBattle Content directory. To brand these directories visible, click the Settings push button in the Content Drawer, and then toggle Show Plugin Content.
While Valley of the Ancient showcases a big world, there are no sub-scenes as you lot would traditionally employ for level streaming in UE4. Instead, this sample uses World Sectionalization and Information Layers to break up a scene into separate, editable parts.
To navigate the world, click Window > World Sectionalisation. This volition open the World Partitioning window, which displays a simplified map of your world.
You lot can use your mouse cycle to zoom in on different regions of the world, and yous can click-drag through the cells in this map to select them. Right-click after selecting some cells, then click Load Selected Cells to load them up in the chief viewport. Similarly, y'all can apply Unload Selected Cells to remove cells that you do non want to exist visible, reducing the load on your computer.
Nosotros recommend that you avoid loading all of the world division cells at once, and that you load simply the sections of the level that you lot want to view or edit. The number of cells you can load will depend on the amount of memory your system has available. See the World Partition section below for more details nearly this system.
To view the layers that brand upwardly the dark and low-cal worlds, click Window > Data Layers to bring upwards the Data Layers window.
You can apply this window to enable or disable whatever of the layers that make up the scene. To view the dark earth, enable the Nighttime World data layer. To view the light globe, enable the Campfire Replace, Foliage, and Hero Area Mountain Range data layers. The Campfire Geometry information layer should e'er be present. Yous can experiment with enabling and disabling these layers to compare both versions of the world.
More than details about these systems, how they are implemented in the sample, and their workflow benefits are available in Collaboratively Constructing a Large World.
High-End Visuals, Fast Iteration
Unreal Engine 5 aims to provide non only a new standard in high-allegiance visuals, simply also the most attainable pipeline for real-time high-resolution applications in the world. In this section, we will detail how UE5's new rendering features contributed to the level of detail in the Valley of the Ancient, as well as the speed and convenience of the team's process for constructing it.
A Direct Path to Quixel Megascans Avails
Quixel Megascans assets gathered from Moab, Utah brand up the courage of the static mesh and texture library for Valley of the Ancient, representing roughly 90% of the assets in the environment. These are located in the AncientContent > Megascans folder within the Content Drawer.
All of these are available in the Canyons of Utah Megascans pack. Moreover, Quixel Bridge is at present integrated straight into Unreal Editor, removing the need for any external programs when importing or managing Megascans assets. UE5 automatically generates the needed textile instances and meshes, and they can be used straight in-game. In the sections beneath, you will see not but how easily UE5 handles these high-resolution assets, only also how its tools gave the environment fine art team an impressive range of flexibility in crafting the landscape.
Nanite Virtualized Geometry
None of these assets use traditional LODs or require additional optimization. Instead, all of them accept Nanite enabled. Nanite streams static mesh assets from disk, then represents them using virtualized geometry, dynamically scaling the number of polygons they use based on the resolution of the user'southward viewport. Virtual texturing behaves similarly for texture detail. This representation changes as the user moves through a scene, updating the level of detail on the wing. Closer objects receive more detail, while farther objects receive less -- simply the total detail onscreen is roughly uniform.
Thanks to Nanite, the Valley of the Ancient environment can apply hundreds of incredibly polygon-dense Megascans assets straight in the scene without any boosted grooming. Even cliff faces weighing in at tens of millions of polygons and using massive textures render instantly, with no boosted setup necessary on the part of technical artists. Fifty-fifty a loftier-polygon Zbrush sculpt tin can be used straight in a game.
To see Nanite in activity, click the View Fashion dropdown and change it from Lit to Nanite Visualization > Triangles.
This will display the triangle output from Nanite in existent time.
Nanite does not support deformations, so it functions only with static meshes. Yet, this is more than plenty to vastly simplify the pipeline for developing environments. Meanwhile, although Nanite tin not employ skeletal deformations, the towering Ancient One in the finale uses static meshes fastened to a skeletal mesh, taking advantage of Nanite to return its ultra-loftier-resolution armor.
For more information virtually how to apply and configure Nanite, refer to the Nanite documentation.
Lumen Global Illumination
Lighting for this detailed valley is powered by Lumen, Unreal Engine 5'due south new fully dynamic global illumination and reflections system. Lumen creates dynamic, conceivable scenes where indirect lighting adapts to changes in direct lighting and geometry, combining new and sometime techniques to achieve loftier-quality real-time results. Lumen is congenital with adjacent-generation consoles and loftier-end PCs in mind, and is targeting 30-60 FPS on these platforms when Unreal Engine v.0 ships.
Lumen is scalable, and supports a broad range of DX11 and DX12-capable hardware using Software and Hardware Ray Tracing modes. Valley of the Ancient uses Software Ray Tracing, which combines Screen Traces (or screen space tracing) with a Surface Cache representation to generate indirect lighting in the scene. Lumen uses Screen Traces to embrace the mismatch that can happen with the lower quality Surface Cache, which is generated from the individual mesh'south Signed Distance Field. You can visualize the Surface Enshroud using Evidence > Visualize > Lumen Scene. The Surface Cache just operates for the showtime 200 meters before falling dorsum to screen traces for the distance scene.
Lumen is versatile and has quality options that enable information technology to work with both Nanite's virtualized geometry and traditional Static Mesh geometry, and screen traces enable skinned meshes to receive and contribute to indirect lighting, but they are limited by what'due south visible on screen. You tin visualize Lumen's combined techniques past clicking Show > Visualize > Lumen Global Illumination within an editor viewport.
Lumen works with all movable light sources, including emissive materials equally light sources. Skylighting uses Lumen's Final Gather for sky shadowing, which allows indoor areas to be much darker than outdoor areas, and helps bring out lightly-colored surfaces that reflect more than lite.
A comparison of the campfire area with Lumen/Skylighting enabled, Lumen disabled, and both Lumen/SkyLighting disabled.
Cheers to the balance of quality, speed, and the "it just works" nature of Lumen, the team was able to low-cal Valley of the Ancient's massive landscape intuitively without needing to worry almost all the configuration options that are present with traditional lighting techniques. For more information about Lumen and more than details about how it works, run into Lumen Global Illumination and Reflections and Lumen Technical Details.
Tailoring Meshes With New Modeling Tools
Many of the Megascans meshes in the environment are not "stock" meshes as originally imported, but rather have been altered within Unreal Editor to adjust the unique needs of the landscape. The surround artists for Valley of the Aboriginal achieved this with the new Modeling Editor Mode in UE5.
While you tin use the modeling editor to build meshes from scratch the aforementioned way you lot would in any DCC tool, you can too select any static mesh or instanced static mesh in the environment and modify its geometry. While editing these on a per-polygon footing would be cumbersome, the Modeling editor mode features numerous deformers and sculpting tools that tin perform quick alterations on dumbo meshes.
For example, let'southward say y'all accept a cliff face asset similar SM_umshejnga_High2, but you need a version of it that curves. You can toggle the Modeling editor style, select that mesh in the viewport, and then use a Bend deformer to it. Later on a few seconds of tweaking, y'all can utilize your deformation to the mesh and encounter the result.
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| Initial mesh. | Bend deformer active. | Concluding event with bend deformer applied. |
Click images for full size.
Without having to re-practise any UVs, yous tin can create a variety of unique meshes from one high-resolution base mesh, with comparable quality to the original. This enables artists to gain maximum flexibility from assets of any resolution, and realize concepts with unique needs, without ever leaving the level editor.
Populating a Landscape with Packed Level Instances
The landscape in the Valley of the Ancient is large plenty that even with the tools discussed so far, it would take an exceptionally long time to construct an environment with so much particular past placing Megascans assets individually. The environs fine art team for Valley of the Ancient therefore leveraged Packed Level Instances to kitbash big-scale assemblies.
Level Instances are essentially nested levels that you can add together to whatever world that implements the World Segmentation system. While you do not demand to utilize Level Instances for World Partitions to work, they are a handy tool for organizing chunks of content in your world into reusable parts, or for breaking a level up into more manageable pieces for editing outside of your master level.
To create a Level Example, select a grouping of objects in the world, right-click, and click Create From Selection.
This opens the New Level Instance menu, where you can choose the type of Level Instance you want to create.
When y'all click OK, you can salve your new Level Case equally a level file in your project, and it will generate a corresponding Pattern nugget forth with it. All of the actors you selected will be replaced by a Level Instance histrion that contains them. Y'all tin can edit the Level Example using its level file, and place a copy of the Level Example using its Blueprint asset.
Manipulating Level Instances is every bit unproblematic every bit manipulating other actors in your level. You can also edit the component parts of a Level Instance in-place. In the Details panel for a placed Level Instance, click the Edit button nether Level Instance Editing to focus on that Level Instance. Yous can then edit the component parts of the Level Instance in the context of the rest of your world.
When you have finished, click Commit Changes to finalize your adjustments and return to editing your world. A prompt will appear to ask if you want to save your changes, and any copies of that Level Instance will take the same changes.
The Valley of the Aboriginal sample primarily uses Packed Level Instances to create assemblies. Unlike standard Level Instances, These ignore any actors that are non static meshes, and convert static meshes to instanced static meshes, reducing the number of describe calls created past their component avails.
This workflow provided a mode for the surroundings art team to independently build a library of large-calibration assemblies and edit them non-destructively. These varied from pocket-sized, versatile assets that brand up the observable landscape around the actor, too as massive geoforms that can compose large chunks of distant landscape. While many of these assemblies are composed with static mesh assets constitute inside the editor, some were custom-built by the squad using the Megascans assets as a base of operations. This gave the team a flexible assembly line to set up-wearing apparel over four square kilometers of land with photograph-realistic detail in just a few weeks.
You can discover the map files for these assemblies in the AncientGameContent/Maps/MASS binder, and you can find the Level Case actors that correspond to them in the AncientGameContent/Geometry binder. Refer to Level Instancing for more information about how to use these tools.
Chaos Destruction Workflow
The process of developing the destructible meshes for Valley of the Ancient, such as the columns in the night world and the mound that the Ancient One rises from during the finale, drove many improvements to the Chaos Destruction workflow in UE5. The workflow that the squad developed uses a combination of the new Modeling and Fracture editor modes.
The destruction team relied heavily on the Modeling tools to gear up the meshes and create targeted fractures. Simplify, Planar Cut (PlnCut), Offset, and Displace (to add a noisier surface) made information technology possible for the initial fractures to be sculpted from the source meshes themselves. The Boolean tool was used throughout this process to remove any overlapping Meshes penetrating through each other, leaving only the geometry on the surface. Stray polygons or floating islands of geometry were removed using the TriSel tool.
In the Fracture editing mode, the team used the Mesh Fracture tool to separate the destructible mesh into big chunks. This tool effectively uses some other mesh to take a "bite" out of the geometry, functioning similarly to a Boolean subtraction tool, but leaving both parts of the mesh in place. The chunks created by this tool act as the primary fractures for the destructible object, providing a degree of command over how they look when they crumble. Later on creating these chunks, the squad applied a more traditional, Voronoi fracture (using the Compatible or Cluster fracture tools) to break it into smaller pieces.
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| Applying a mesh cutting to a cavalcade. | Cavalcade later on applying mesh cut. | Applying a voronoi fracture. |
Click images for full size.
Thanks to the Noise settings introduced in UE5, these fractures have natural-looking, non-compatible edges.
The team used the AutoUV tool to UV the internal surfaces of the fractured assets. This tool generates a texture that maps to a slope based on the depth of the mesh. This provides a way to blend materials together to brand different parts of the cantankerous-section have different surface qualities based on depth, providing a more natural appearance. For instance, parts of the mesh deeper within the cantankerous-department tin can have a dustier, more dry wait, while parts closer to the surface can look darker and more weathered.
Finally, the team cached the physics simulation for the assets using a Chaos Cache Manager. This is a system that can record a simulation in-editor and play it back ingame, ensuring that it gain the aforementioned manner every fourth dimension in one case it is triggered. This provides a mode to show complex, detailed destruction in-game while conserving on processing, and also makes information technology possible to author destruction in a way that suits specific in-game needs for level pattern. For instance, the offset column that Echo destroys volition never autumn in such a style that it will block the entrance, and the Ancient One'southward mound won't exit behind debris that prevents Repeat from traversing the loonshit. Later on recording a simulation with a cache manager, placing a copy of it in a level will place all of the other assets associated with it.
The original simulation setups for these assets take been stripped in the final build of the project. Still, the geometry collections and enshroud managers for them are located in AncientBattle Content > Maps > Destruction. You can examine the collections in c_Destruction > 3_Lt_Hand for an example of the avails used for targeted fractures, and you can view the L_AncientBattle_Gameplay level to come across all the cache managers used in the nighttime world.
Improvements to the flexibility of this workflow are ongoing. In the meantime, the implementation in the Valley of the Ancient provides a proof of concept for how we are improving the quality, accessibility, and flexibility of Chaos devastation in UE5.
Setting the Mood With Sky Atmosphere and Volumetric Niagara Effects
To consummate the atmosphere in the Valley of the Ancient, nosotros use the new Sky Temper organization.
By placing a Sky Atmosphere actor in your scene, you can configure information about a simulated planet, including its basis radius in kilometers, physical parameters for its atmosphere, and fine art direction overrides. This organization works in conjunction with a Directional Light set as the Atmosphere Sunday Light, every bit well as a Sky Light. With all of these elements in place, the Sky Atmosphere system generates realistic atmosphere, volumetric clouds, and fog on a global scale. The environment lighting in this scene is completely dynamic thanks to the Sky Low-cal's real time capture and convolution process.
In the Valley of the Ancient, the light globe uses a Sky Atmosphere role player, showcasing a more subtle atmosphere that is reflective of real-world Earth. Information technology also features blithe volumetric clouds, which are dynamically lit in real-time. Meanwhile, the dark world uses a more than traditional skydome to achieve its more stylized, fantastical look.
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| Light World Scene | Night Globe Scene |
Click image for full size.
For the finishing touches, such equally the mist and sand blowing beyond the rocky terrain, the squad used Niagara particles in conjunction with volumetric paint information to directly them through the environment.
You can find the actors for these particle systems in the Nighttime World information layer: BP_NiagaraPainted_FarFog, BP_NiagaraPainted_FogDetail, and BP_NiagaraPainted_SandStripe.
Each of them uses 2 Niagara Data Interface textures: a VolumetricPaintingDensityMap, and a VolumetricPaintingVelocityMap.
The density map uses RGB data coupled with an alpha channel to determine the superlative and density of particles relative to the terrain, while the velocity map determines the direction that these particles motion in. The team used a custom-built volumetric painting tool to paint these layers in the surroundings and output these textures. In the image below, the grid overlaid on the environment represents the density map, while the arrows correspond the flow map. BP_NiagaraPainted_FogDetail (fog flipbooks) is layered on summit of BP_TerrainFogMaster (volumetric fog) with identical 3D density to add details.
With this method, the Valley of the Ancient simulates over 100,000 GPU particles across the night world'due south mural using simply 3 Niagara systems. All the Niagara systems are so fitted to the environment and Volumetric Fog, which uses the same volumetric painting data, to add bespoke item. While the tools for volumetric painting are still in development, this offers a proof of concept for its performance and utility when combined with the power of Niagara.
Collaboratively Constructing a Large World
In the past, users would carve up a level into sub-scenes and use either the level streaming arrangement or the World Composition system to stream them in and out of a persistent level. This requires meticulous organization and makes information technology difficult for users to collaborate, every bit typically just one user can modify a scene at a time without encountering version control issues.
In Unreal Engine 5, nosotros take re-invented the manner you interact with level files to brand this process cleaner and more intuitive. Non only tin you edit massive worlds from simply one level file, but you can do then in a collaborative surround with dozens of other developers with minimal conflicts. This section will detail the tools that make this possible, and how they benefited the team'due south collaboration when building the Valley of the Ancient.
I File Per Player
The entire globe in Valley of the Aboriginal uses UE5's new One File Per Actor (OFPA) arrangement. When enabled, this arrangement writes a separate file for each unique instance of an role player placed within a level rather than writing its information into a single map file.
As a user interacting with the level editor, nothing about your workflow is changed. To edit a level, you lot notwithstanding open a unmarried level file in the editor. However, since the underlying file system tracks each thespian as a separate file, level designers and environment artists tin edit different regions or layers of the same level and rarely, if ever, come across a conflict when committing their changes to a version control system.
Valley of the Ancient has OFPA enabled globally. You can observe this setting nether World Settings in the Advanced section of the Globe parameters, where it is labeled Employ External Actors.
At your choice, you tin enable this for individual actors or globally for an entire project. Refer to the One File Per Actor documentation for more than information.
Thanks to this organization, the developers on Valley of the Ancient were able to commit their changes rapidly throughout a day of piece of work and quickly encounter each other's changes in-editor, all without worrying about resolving versioning conflicts. Tweaks to gameplay scripting and environment art could occur aslope each other constantly, enabling a rapid footstep of iteration and a highly collaborative environment art pipeline.
Globe Sectionalization
Large worlds in games depend on dividing a map into many sections that can be loaded and unloaded as the actor traverses the mural, as it is not feasible to load an entire multi-kilometer map all at once. In by toolsets, this required developers to manually split up their maps into sub-levels and carefully manage when they streamed in and out. Viewing sections of the globe in context with each other could often exist difficult.
The new World Sectionalisation system greatly simplifies this process. In one case Globe Partitioning is enabled for a level, information technology automatically divides objects into cells based on their filigree position and updates the content of those cells as you arrange the world in the level editor, so you never need to manually assign objects to cells. During gameplay, World Partition automatically loads and unloads cells equally players traverse through the game world, without the need for manually managing them or designating streaming volumes.
World Segmentation is enabled in the World Settings for the AncientWorld scene, under World Partition Setup.
Y'all tin can view the Earth Sectionalisation window by clicking Window > Globe Partition. Within, you tin can click and drag editor cells to select them, and load or unload them for editing purposes. You tin can as well utilize this window for quick navigation in the editor by moving the camera to a selected jail cell.
You can check the World Partition settings of private actors in their Details, nether the World Partitioning section. This tin as well be edited in class defaults within the Blueprint editor.
By default, most actors in the surroundings utilize their position inside the Earth Partition filigree to determine what prison cell they belong to. Echo is notably fix to e'er be loaded, equally she is the player character.
Equally you lot can see, the Earth Partition arrangement greatly streamlines the procedure of building a large earth. While it is yet managing many files like to sub-levels behind the scenes, artists and designers are free to focus on the environs and the user experience they wish to create, while the technical details are automated. For more information about how to configure World Partitions in your games, refer to the World Partition section.
Data Layers
Data Layers are a system for organizing the objects in the world into dissever layers that can optionally be loaded and unloaded at-will. This arrangement provides another culling to sub-levels, designed to work in tandem with World Partition. It can provide another organizational tool for your projects, or information technology can drive gameplay features and give yous an extra degree of control over your world.
You tin open the Data Layers window past clicking Window > Data Layers. You lot can use this bill of fare to create, organize, and load or unload Data Layers in the editor.
Yous tin can run into the Information Layer information for an actor past scrolling to the Data Layers department of its Details. You tin can use the dropdowns here to modify the actor's data layer, or click and drag a data layer from the Data Layers window into i of these entries.
You can also click and drag actors from the World Outliner onto a Data Layer to assign multiple actors to a Information Layer at once.
Valley of the Ancient uses Data Layers to drive the transition between the light globe and the dark world. When Echo activates the portal, it unloads several data layers representing the light world and loads another set representing the dark earth.
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| Light World | Dark World |
Click images for full size.
These are activated and deactivated using in-game events, triggered past the Night Earth Rift object. Both are built in the same level file, overlapping the same infinite, making them truly unlike versions of the same world.
The Campfire Information Layer is used for both worlds, creating a common frame of reference for the player as Echo shifts from 1 earth to the other. At that place is no need for a redundant version of this set piece, and the only matter that changes its appearance is the temper and lighting used in the light and dark worlds.
During development, this too provided a valuable tool for separating gameplay and gear up dressing elements, as environment artists could work in their own Data Layers without needing to interact with overlapping triggers or gameplay objects, and designers could focus on objects that were relevant to ingame events.
For more than information, refer to the Information Layers page.
Flexible Real-Time Animation
UE5 too introduces several improvements to existent-time animation with skeletal meshes, focused on characters and how they interact with the globe. The Valley of the Ancient puts these to use in driving the interactions for both Echo too as the massive Ancient One she confronts at the stop of the demo.
Motion Warping
The new Movement Warping system provides a way for animations to suit their root movement based on warp points in the surroundings. This makes it possible to employ ane animation flexibly in a multifariousness of situations, greatly condensing the workload for treatment complex ecology interactions.
Equally an example, in the Valley of the Aboriginal demo, Echo can vault over debris and obstacles in the night world.
In previous workflows, making this kind of ingame action would require the team to either adopt highly restrictive conventions virtually the physical parameters of obstacles, create specific animations for specific obstacles, or interruption these actions up into component animations with complex rules about how and when to play them.
In this project, notwithstanding, Repeat's vault is handled entirely by the VaultOver_Montage asset.
This asset uses new MotionWarping Notify States to mark segments of the animation where the character's root motion can exist warped to fit the environment. Each one responds to a Sync Point placed in the environment. In this instance, they are called FrontEdge, BackEdge, and BackFloor, and they correspond to dissimilar reference points on a vaultable object. FrontEdge represents the location where Echo's hand touches the object to pull herself up, BackEdge represents the bespeak where she kicks off with a quick hop, and BackFloor represents the bespeak where she lands on the other side of the object.
These points are gear up inside a GameplayAbility chosen GA_Vault, which triggers the vaulting behavior based on the VaultingTriggerVolume fastened to BP_EchoCharacter. While there are congenital-in Blueprint nodes for setting individual motion warping sync points, this ability uses a custom node that computes all of the sync points at in one case based on data well-nigh the vaultable player.
When these three points are provided to Echo'south MotionWarping component, the VaultOver_Montage will automatically align her root move to these points when it plays. This factors in the duration of the MotionWarping notify states, as well as their settings for how the motility warp for those segments should comport.
Thanks to this arrangement, Repeat can easily vault over a variety of objects in the environment with simply one animation. Regardless of their tiptop or depth, her animation will accommodate itself to fit each of the destination points provided in a way that feels natural. This enables developers to gain an immense corporeality of flexibility out of a small library of animation assets.
For more information nearly how to implement Motion Warping, refer to the Movement Warping documentation.
Command Rig Improvements
Both Echo and the mighty Ancient 1 implement Unreal Engine'south Control Rig, making it possible to animate both of them inside Unreal Editor. In UE5, we have expanded the tools bachelor with Control Rig to include:
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The Pose Library, which keeps a list of reusable poses that you tin can quickly assign to parts of your model as you lot build animations.
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The Tween Tool, which tin generate in-between keyframes and weight them according to data about surrounding keyframes.
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The Snapper Tool, which tin pin parts of your control rig to objects inside your game world.
These provide many quality-of-life improvements and shortcuts for composing a library of animations. In the Valley of the Aboriginal sample, the Aboriginal One's animations were authored entirely in the Unreal Editor using Control Rig and Sequencer past the Aaron Sims Creative team, who designed and congenital the model.
Both the Ancient One and Echo are prepare upward with control rigs, which yous can apply to explore these new features. You lot tin find Echo'south rig in AncientContent > Characters > Echo > Rig, and the Ancient Ane'south control rig in AncientBattle Content > Characters > AncientOne > Rig.
For a more thorough overview of Control Rig's improvements in UE5, refer to the Control Rig documentation.
Full-Body IK Solver
Both characters also implement the new Full-body IK (FBIK) Solver, which provides an extra layer to how they answer to the environment. FBIK is practical within each character'southward Control Rig asset as a node in the Frontwards Solve graph. This solver applies corrections to a model on a post-process layer after all the standard animations for the mesh are processed.
Every bit an example of this in action, when the Ancient performs its energy beam attack, the placement of its arm is controlled by Blueprint logic equally it tracks Echo's position, and the total-torso IK solver handles the corrections for the rest of its trunk every bit it fires the axle.
As a more subtle example, Echo uses FBIK to arrange to the varying terrain inside the game world, adjusting her anxiety to the bending of the ground and irresolute the position of her hips when moving on uneven surfaces. This creates more varied and natural movement, particularly as she navigates up and downwards slopes or over obstacles.
For more information nigh how to implement Full-Trunk IK, refer to the Full-Body IK documentation.
Building Modular Gameplay
UE5 also provides a framework for modularly building gameplay, and the Valley of the Aboriginal leverages these systems during the transition to the dark world. Not merely does Echo's environment change, merely new sets of input bindings and mechanics are introduced at runtime.
Extending Gameplay With Game Characteristic Plugins
In the light world, Echo uses a remote-controlled mote of calorie-free to get a bird's eye view of her surround. In the dark globe, she can throw a calorie-free sprint to destroy obstacles and impairment enemies. Each of these systems is a discrete Game Feature Plugin. Inspired by the Fortnite pipeline, this organisation makes it possible to develop features independently from 1 some other and integrate them into the main game at-will. You lot tin can even load and unload them at runtime.
To create a new Game Feature, open the Plugins window and click Create Plugin. You can select a Game Characteristic for your base of operations plugin type.
The plugin can and then be found inside your projection's Plugins directory.
When using standard plugins, the game can refer to classes and avails from those plugins, but the plugins do not have visibility into the base game'southward code or assets. With Game Features, that dependency flow is reversed. They depend on the base game, only the base game tin can not reference classes or functions from a game feature. This makes their implementation similar to mods, extending or modifying elements from the base game.
In Valley of the Ancient, the Lite Dart and the Ancient 1 are both contained in the AncientBattle game feature. The bones systems that Repeat needs to gain and use special abilities are already built into her base Role player, merely the Light Sprint provides a specific implementation of it. The Ancient One and other actors capable of responding to damage are also contained in this Game Characteristic, making the combat organization fully encapsulated within this module. This feature's content is located in the AncientBattle Content folder.
To view this game characteristic's content in the Content Drawer, click the Settings button, then check Show Plugin Content and locate the AncientBattle Content binder.
All assets related to the Light Sprint, including animations, visual effects, UI elements, and Blueprints are located inside this folder. At the top level of this folder there is a AncientBattle Game Feature Information asset.
This nugget contains instructions on how the plugin should conduct when it is loaded and unloaded. The Light Dart plugin specifically has instructions to add the LightDart Gameplay Power to Echo, set her upwardly with input that will activate the power, and attach needed components to her.
During gameplay, these features are toggled inside the BP_DarkWorldRift Blueprint when triggering the transition to the dark world.
No boosted references to the LightDart are necessary in the game's main codebase or assets. Once it is added to Echo, all of its components are ready to apply thanks to the instructions in its Game Feature Data.
This system enables developers to easily control what sets of features are agile at a given time. It is specially useful when dealing with mechanics that piece of work within a express timeframe or scope. Here we employ it to toggle Repeat'due south Light Dart when she transitions between worlds, just it is just equally hands adaptable to limited events in online games, cursory cinematic segments, or major manner changes during gameplay.
For more information almost Game Characteristic plugins and how to implement them in your projects, refer to the Game Feature Plugins documentation.
Flexible Controls With the Enhanced Input Organization
UE5 features a new Enhanced Input System, which is used in Valley of the Ancient for Repeat's controls. This system not just handles Echo's movement and abilities, merely also provides methods for treatment the context-sensitive elements of those inputs, including situational data for specific controls and adding or removing inputs based on player states.
Whereas the input system in UE4 processed raw inputs with events in an Actor'due south event graph, Enhanced Input models controls as Input Actions, which are represented past assets in the Content Drawer. Most of the Input Actions for Valley of the Ancient are located in Content > AncientGameContent > Input. The Input Actions specific to the dark world are contained in AncientBattle_Content > Input, and the Input Deportment specific to the hover drone are contained in HoverDrone_Content > Input.
These include not only mutual controls, like IA_MoveForward and IA_MoveRight, but also highly situational ones, like IA_SitStand, which is used when Echo stands up from the campfire. You can open up Input Actions to configure what type of value they render, including unlike types of centrality values. You lot tin can as well provide a listing of Triggers, which add together contextual requirements to activate the input, or Modifiers, which process the value of the input earlier passing information technology to gameplay.
Triggers and Modifiers make it possible to handle dead zones, responsiveness curves, or contextual actions that are required to actuate the input, all without manually filtering input data in gameplay code for your Actors. You lot can add more Triggers or Modifiers to your projects past defining them as either Blueprint or C++ classes.
In one case an InputAction is defined in your Content Drawer, you can access it using an effect in Blueprint. The InputActions for controlling Echo are handled in BP_EchoCharacter.
While these events function similarly to standard Input events, they provide more contextual information about the Input Action, including when an action starts, finishes, is in-progress, or gets forcibly canceled, besides as the time that the action is active. The value of the input effect is defined by the Value Type listed in the InputAction asset. Any Modifiers listed for the InputAction will be practical before this value is output.
Input Mapping Contexts handle mapping InputActions to physical controls. You can observe these assets alongside the InputActions. IM_ThirdPerson_Controls_InputMapping contains the majority of Repeat's controls, while IM_LightDartInputMappings contains the added controls for the Light Dart power and jogging.
These are organized similarly to the action and axis mappings in the input system from UE4, but in add-on to mapping InputActions to physical inputs, they also can employ Modifiers and Triggers to specific control implementations. For instance, Echo reads IA_MoveForward to determine forwards and backwards movement. While the Due west cardinal has no Modifiers added to it, the Southward key uses a Negate modifier, which will cause it to read as negative input.
One of the advantages of Input Mapping Contexts is that they can be added and removed for private players at runtime. For example, the AncientBattle Game Characteristic plugin adds IM_LightDartInputMappings when it is loaded.
This Game Feature activity was created specifically for this projection in C++. You can see another example of input mappings being added and removed at runtime in the HoverDroneControlsComponent, a C++ form in the HoverDrone Gameplay Feature that extends the EnhancedInputComponent.
This instance illustrates how the Enhanced Input system provides a highly extensible and flexible framework for managing a game'southward inputs. You tin can easily aggrandize upon and adjust a game's inputs over the grade of development without subversive changes to gameplay code, and this system has many tools for contextual or special case inputs. For more data, refer to the Enhanced Input System documentation.
Dynamic Interactive Sound
In add-on to all of the tools that give you lot freedom in building visuals, game mechanics, and worlds, Unreal Engine 5 also provides more than control over your game's sound with an all-new audio system. This department will evidence y'all how Valley of the Ancient uses these new tools to provide an extra sense of smoothen and dynamism for Echo's final encounter with the Ancient One.
MetaSounds
MetaSounds is the new loftier-performance audio organization for Unreal Engine 5, providing a fully featured Dynamic Signal Processing (DSP) graph for audio designers. This system can synthesize procedural sound furnishings and music from the ground up, and features a Blueprint API that provides a style for designers to manipulate sounds based on gameplay events and in-game data. This provides sound designers with robust flexibility during evolution, supporting fast iteration, circuitous and dynamic sounds, and the ability to effortlessly adapt audio effects to game design changes.
For an instance of the power and versatility of MetaSounds, you can observe sfx_Golem_RobotBlast_Meta in the AncientBattle Content folder nether Audio > MetaSounds.
This MetaSound uses a mixture of procedurally generated sound and .wav samples to create the sound effect for charging the Aboriginal One's axle. The first sections handle the bulk of synthesizing and modulating the main charge-upwards sound, which is completely procedural.
The Intro Wave and Shot Waves sections add together an actress layer of texture to the sound with some supplemental .wav files. The Intro Moving ridge section triggers when the axle initially starts to charge upward. The Shot Waves section as well has a sound that triggers when the axle begins charging, just also has components that trigger after the accuse-upward sound has fully played.
The eye sections of the graph handle mixing and filtering between each of these dissimilar sections into a final Stereo Mix, so feed into the Output node to play the final sound.
Triggers, parameters, and .wav files act as inputs, then the MetaSounds menstruation graph processes that information based on DSP nodes and mixes it into a final sound output. This organization provides audio designers with a workflow for sound that is as powerful and flexible as the Material editor, capable of adapting to both typical sound parameters likewise as in-game data, making it possible for them to piece of work more closely and efficiently with a game development squad inside one sound pattern environs.
For case, during development of the battle sequence, a lot of iteration time was spent fine-tuning the amount of fourth dimension the Ancient Ane spends charging up its axle. In other sound design workflows, this might entail re-authoring the sound based on changes to gameplay. Instead, the sfx_Golem_RobotBlast_meta MetaSound uses a Time input called ChargeDuration to determine how long the sound should play. Since the main charging sound is entirely procedural, it automatically adjusts its length based on the given input.
To see this in action, select ChargeDuration from the Inputs list, change information technology from its default value of 4.0 seconds, and then endeavour playing the audio.
Thanks to this functionality, the game pattern team could change the Ancient One's charge elapsing every bit often as necessary without the demand to re-writer this sound.
At that place are many other Input parameters available to work with, including Triggers that you can activate from gameplay lawmaking using the Audio Parameter Interface. You tin can use these to create MetaSounds that procedurally handle starts, stops, and intermediate events. For instance, where an activeness like a gun firing would previously require multiple sounds for starting, stopping, and looping burn, this organization tin can condense it all into just ane MetaSound.
You tin likewise manipulate other audio parameters using this API. This makes it possible for MetaSounds to fully encapsulate the sound playback logic for complex sound effects, all with sample-accurate timing.
MetaSounds' capacity for flexible blueprint and space variation is complemented by significant functioning improvements. The MetaSounds graph is rendered asynchronously, similarly to how individual sound effects are normally decoded, which provides an actress caste of flexibility in handling CPU resources. More importantly, since MetaSounds is a true audio rendering arrangement, each MetaSound represents a single in-game phonation, regardless of its complexity. This means that the playback you lot hear in the MetaSounds editor will e'er be authentic to its in-game sound, and in-game voice management is more predictable compared with before systems. This also condenses the workflow for evaluating audio performance, as in the future UE5 will exist able to profile the performance of specific MetaSounds individually.
For more than in-depth information on MetaSounds, refer to the MetaSounds documentation.
Quartz Audio Synchronization
Commonly, discrepancies between the mode the gameplay and audio threads are processed makes it difficult to synchronize events between them with accurate timing. Quartz provides a clock for scheduling sample-accurate audio playback from gameplay events. When you lot schedule a sound using Quartz, yous tin prepare up delegates based on specific timing relative to scheduled playback. The Quartz Clock will provide event delegates for that sound's playback so that gameplay can anticipate the intended timing and synchronize other gameplay events when advisable. This makes it possible to create sample accurate dynamic music systems, also as game systems with a high level of synchronicity with audio.
Valley of the Ancient uses Quartz in its dynamic music system, chosen the Underscore Subsystem, which schedules events based on musical beats and bars. Notably, the Aboriginal One chooses when to burn down its laser based on the timing of the music cue during its showdown with Repeat. Classes for this organization are contained in Underscore C++ Classes.
Music for this arrangement is independent in a special data asset called an UnderscoreCue, which contains the data for the music cue's fourth dimension signature, different musical sections, transitions, and other information relating to musical states and events. The battle music for the Ancient One's battle is contained in the Arena_Battle_Cue asset, which is located in AncientContent > Audio > UnderscoreCues.
This contains the references to the clips that make up this music cue, also equally the music's BPM and Fourth dimension Signature. This data is a clarification of the music, used past the music system to prepare upwardly the Quartz Clock and manage timing transitions between each section. The introduction is fix upward to transition into the main trunk of the battle music, which is broken upwards into several different states. These states occur based on many different in-game events, and the music concludes with a beat-synchronous ending. Thank you to Quartz, all of this occurs with seamless, sample-authentic precision.
To encounter an example of how these sections chronicle to in-game events, you can observe hooks for this organisation throughout BP_Laser and BP_AncientOne, which are in the AncientBattle Content directory. In improver to the logic for the laser itself, BP_Laser contains calls to bind events to the Underscore Subsystem, enabling the music to trigger the laser.
It also contains calls to the Underscore Subsystem to tell the music when to transition to other sections of the song, including when the beam finishes firing and when the Ancient One is defeated.
These are just a few examples of how the Underscore subsystem uses Quartz to facilitate dynamic music systems and precise interactions between gameplay and audio.
Final Notes
Every bit yous can run into, Unreal Engine v features a range of incredible tools that brand ambitious, high-fidelity projects more attainable to build than e'er before. The Valley of the Ancient brings all of these tools together to provide both a sample of the product values you lot can achieve, as well as a case study in how the very same tools likewise streamline the development procedure for games. With UE5, developers will attain amend-quality visuals with fewer steps, larger worlds with less busywork, and more detailed interactions and environments with tools that empower creators.
Source: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/valley-of-the-ancient-sample-game-for-unreal-engine
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