Valley of the Ancient is a short gameplay segment demonstrating early access features in Unreal Engine 5. Players control Echo, who appeared in the UE5 announcement trailer, as she explores an arid landscape and finds a portal to a mysterious dark realm. Inside, she navigates through a series of obstacles and battles the massive Ancient One. This sample provides a snapshot of the many quality of life features, rendering enhancements, and workflow innovations available in UE5.
This document will take you on a guided tour through these exciting new features, and how the team at Epic 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.
Valley of the Ancient Sample Contents:
- Overview
- Accessing the Valley of the Ancient Sample
- Recommended System Specs
- Familiarizing Yourself With the UE5 Editor
- The Content Drawer
- Accessing Editor Modes
- Navigating the Sample
- High-End Visuals, Fast Iteration
- A Direct Path to Quixel Megascans Assets
- Nanite Virtualized Geometry
- Lumen Global Illumination
- Tailoring Meshes With New Modeling Tools
- Populating a Landscape with Packed Level Instances
- Chaos Destruction Workflow
- Setting the Mood With Sky Atmosphere and Volumetric Niagara Effects
- Collaboratively Constructing a Large World
- One File Per Actor
- World Partition
- Data Layers
- Flexible Real-Time Animation
- Motion Warping
- Control Rig Improvements
- Full-Body IK Solver
- Building Modular Gameplay
- Extending Gameplay With Game Feature Plugins
- Flexible Controls With the Enhanced Input System
- Dynamic Interactive Audio
- MetaSounds
- Quartz Audio Synchronization
- Final Notes