The Matrix Awakens dev says the switch from UE4 to UE5 was 'very smooth'

pcgamer.com:

Gears 5 developer The Coalition came out with a demo for The Matrix Awakens(opens in new tab) at the State of Unreal event yesterday. It's one of the first examples of a game designed and built in Unreal Engine 5, and we have to say, UE5 games are looking stunning(opens in new tab).

The team's Cavern Cinematic Tech Test touts 10 million poly, movie-quality assets, real time rendered in 100x more detail than in the previous engine.

But making the leap to the new engine couldn't have been a cake walk, right? There are so many new facets for aspiring UE5 devs to learn(opens in new tab)—the Nanite geometry system, World Partition, Lumen, and Meta Human, to name a few.

We've been learning about The Coalition's journey from UE4 to UE5 during the making of their Aplha point demo, and how their approach has evolved as The Matrix Awakens takes shape.

Xbox News(opens in new tab) spoke to Kate Rayner, The Coalition's studio technical director, who expresses her amazement at how easy the transition was for the team. «The biggest surprise to me was how finished the engine was, and how easy it was to bring UE4 content into UE5 seamlessly.»

In discussing the switch, she recalls it as «very smooth, it only took us about two weeks to get the team switched over. As of now, our full studio has transitioned to UE5.»

The team actually switched over to UE5 about a month into their Alpha Point demo build, which aired at GDC last year. They started building it in UE4 but, as Colin Penty explains in The Making of Alpha Point(opens in new tab) vid, «this demo was running really painfully slow in UE4. Right before we switched to UE4 the artists were all complaining.»

Once we brought it into UE5 it snapped to life immediately.

Kate expands the